Term and citation retrieval: A field study

Abstract

The relative efficacy of searching by terms and by citations is investigated with real searches collected in health sciences libraries. The objective is to seek evidence to confirm or refute findings from a controlled pilot study, and to understand the factors at work in operational search environments. Overall confirmation was found. In both the pilot and field studies, the improvement of the odds that overlap items retrieved would be relevant or partially relevant was truly astounding. If an item was retrieved from both MEDLINE(R) and SCISEARCH(R), it was six times more likely that it would be relevant or partially relevant as opposed to being not relevant, and 8.4 times more likely for definitely relevant retrievals. In the field setting, citation searching was able to add an average of 24% recall to traditional subject retrieval. Term or citation searching from the open literature produced lower precision results. Attempts to identify distinguishing characteristics in queries which might benefit most from additional citation searches proved to be inconclusive. In spite of the obvious gain shown by citation searching, online access of citation databases has been hampered by their relative high cost.