Citations and references as keys to relevance ranking in interactive IR

Abstract

According to the principle of Polyrepresentation (Ingwersen & Jäärvelin, 2005; Ingwersen, 2012) bibliographic references in scientific documents as well as citations to documents have the potential of serving as useful features for re-ranking of retrieved documents. References (and thus citations) can be seen as footprints of information interaction, because of the behavioral conventions built in to the scientific communication and publication process. They are manifestations of degrees of utility of methods, results and ideas made earlier on by other scientists. The use of references in IR has been demonstrated to improve retrieval performance (Skov et al. 2008), whereas the number of citations has not provided similar improvements.