This paper studies the correlations between peer review and citation indicators when evaluating research quality in library and information science (LIS). Forty-two LIS experts provided judgments on a 5-point scale of the quality of research published by 101 scholars; the median rankings...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which readers perceive correctly the reasons why authors cite items in scholarly texts. Design/methodology/approach – The authors of ten library and information science articles provided the reasons for citing material in their...

A study has been made of the effect of controlled variations in indexing vocabulary size on retrieval performance using the Cranfield 200 and 1400 test collections. The vocabularies considered are sets of variable‐length character strings chosen from the fronts of document and query terms so...

This paper describes the use of fixed‐length character strings for controlling the size of indexing vocabularies in reference retrieval systems. Experiments with the Cranfield test collection show that trigram encoding of words performs noticeably better than the use of digrams; however, use...

This paper considers the classifications produced by application of the single linkage, complete linkage, group average and Ward clustering methods to the Keen and Cranfield document test collections. Experiments were carried out to study the structure of the hierarchies produced by the...

This paper describes the simulation of a nearest neighbour searching algorithm for document retrieval using a pool of microprocessors. The documents in a database are organised in a multi‐dimensional binary search tree, and the algorithm identifies the nearest neighbour for a query by a...

The implementation of hierarchic agglomerative methods of cluster anlaysis for large datasets is very demanding of computational resources when implemented on conventional computers. The ICL Distributed Array Processor (DAP) allows many of the scanning and matching operations required in...

The term discrimination value of an index term has been proposed as a quantitative measure of the extent to which that term can discriminate between documents in bibliographic databases. Previous work has suggested that the most discriminating terms are those with medium frequencies of...

An increasing volume of historical text is being converted into machine‐readable form so as to allow database searches to be carried out. The age of the material in these databases means that they contain many spellings that are different from those used today. This characteristic means that,...

An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of inter‐nodal links that are intended to represent the relationships existing between objects; this operation is often undertaken manually, just as index terms are often manually...