Reports a study that examined 10 collections of mainly scientific subject areas indexed using Farradane's system of relational indexing. It compared (1) the use of relations, (2) the use of concept types, (3) the cross sections (or shape) of abstracts, and (4) the properties of "nodes." Statistical tables and graphs are included.…

Results of an investigation designed to determine whether the impact factor or the immediacy index--two derivative measures of citation analysis--provide useful insights into qualitative relationships among scientific journals indicate that neither measure is significant. (MBR)

The Cobb-Douglas model applied to value added as a function of labor, capital, purchases of information services, and purchases of other input is used to investigate the use of information by the industrial sector of Croatia, Yugoslavia. It is concluded that less than an optimal amount of information resources is being used. (13 references)…

Describes experiments that compared a new method for automatically analyzing semantic structures in text by statistical means with the standard vector space model. Findings indicate that combining both methods improved performance over either alone. The effects of other experimental variables on retrieval performance (term weighting, suffix…

Research designed to identify the best evaluation measure(s) for interactive information retrieval (IR) performance studied 20 measures in a natural IR environment with 40 real end users. These users found overall search value to be the most important factor and recall was more important than precision. Additional evaluation criteria are suggested…

Describes a study that supported two hypotheses concerning the use of anaphors in information retrieval: first, that anaphors tend to refer to integral concepts rather than peripheral concepts; second, that various term weighting schemes are affected differently by anaphoric resolution. The implications for the use of anaphoric resolution for…

Investigates the relationships between the parameters of the Simon-Yule model and the shapes of three bibliometric distributions: Lotka's Law of Scientific Productivity; Bradford's Law of Bibliometric Scattering; and Zipf's Law of Word Frequency. The results indicate that the probability of a new entry determines the characteristics of all three…

Various methods for calculating and presenting results of information retrieval (IR) evaluation research are discussed, with illustrations from recent laboratory results. Highlights include measures for calculating recall and precision, user needs for high or low level of recall, and comparisons of Boolean and ranked output retrieval. (22…

Studies the performance of probabilistic information retrieval systems using differing statistical dependence assumptions when estimating the probabilities inherent in the retrieval model. Experimental results using the Bahadur Lazarsfeld expansion on the Cystic Fibrosis database are discussed that suggest that incorporating term dependence…

Empirical comparisons are made of three statistical sampling methods evaluated for estimating total number of relevant documents in collection for given query: simple random sampling, random sampling which assigns unequal selection probabilities to individual documents in collection, and curve fitting and extrapolation. Nine references and…

Discusses methods of weighting of descriptors in document search patterns together with the concept of relative indexing and conditions which should be satisfied by descriptor weight. A procedure for modifiying document search patterns based on users' informational needs and opinions is outlined, and examples are given. Sixteen references are…

Reports on a study of accounting information systems that explored the interactions among influence factors (e.g., user participation in the development process, top management support, capability of information systems personnel, and existence of steering committees), contextual variables (e.g., organizational structure and task characteristics),…

Describes study of manual and experimental automated circulation systems in a university library in Nigeria. Data were collected for eight circulation activities in order to calculate the direct labor costs of circulating a book on each system. Automated system's book circulation costs were higher although direct labor costs were less. (MBR)

Discusses the design of a model-based management information system in terms of mathematical/statistical, information processing, and human factors issues and presents a prototype system for interlibrary loan networks. (Author/CWM)

This overview of the research process for the novice information retrieval (IR) researcher provides guidance on selecting a research question, choosing the type of test, defining variables, developing or using databases, finding and processing queries, assigning treatments to experimental units, collecting and analyzing the data, and presenting…