2022/07/07 by Bascur, Juan Pablo, Verberne, Suzan, van Eck, Nees Jan +1 · 2 citations
#Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.03299
The field of scientometrics has shown the power of citation-based clusters for literature analysis, yet this technique has barely been used for information retrieval tasks. This work evaluates the performance of citation based-clusters for information retrieval tasks. We simulated a search process using these clusters with a tree hierarchy of clusters and a cluster selection algorithm. We evaluated the task of finding the relevant documents for 25 systematic reviews. Our evaluation considered several trade-offs between recall and precision for the cluster selection, and we also replicated the Boolean queries self-reported by the systematic review to serve as a reference. We found that citation-based clusters search performance is highly variable and unpredictable, that it works best for users that prefer recall over precision at a ratio between 2 and 8, and that when used along with query-based search they complement each other, including finding new relevant documents.