Reference directed indexing: Redeeming relevance for subject search in citation indexes

Abstract

Citation indexes are valuable tools for research, in part because they provide a means with which to measure the relative impact of articles in a collection of scientific literature. Recent efforts demonstrate some value in retrieval systems for citation indexes based on measures of impact. However, such approaches use weak measures of relevance, ranking together a few useful documents with many that are frequently cited but irrelevant. We propose an indexing technique that joins measures of relevance and impact in a single retrieval metric. This approach, called Reference Directed Indexing (RDI) is based on a comparison of the terms authors use in reference to documents. Initial retrieval experiments with RDI indicate that it retrieves documents of a quality on par with current ranking metrics, but with significantly improved relevance. © Springer-Verlag 2003.