A re-examination of relevance: toward a dynamic, situational definition
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Communication efficiency in research and development
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Unused relevant information in research and development
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Journal of the American Society for Information Science - Special topic issue on the history of documentation and information science: part II
Design considerations in instrumenting and monitoring Web-based information retrieval systems
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Usage patterns of a Web-based library catalog
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Logistic Regression Using the SAS System: Theory and Application
Logistic Regression Using the SAS System: Theory and Application
An analytical approach to deriving usage patterns in a web-based information system
An analytical approach to deriving usage patterns in a web-based information system
Using clustering techniques to detect usage patterns in a Web-based information system
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Stochastic modeling of usage patterns in a Web-based information system
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Implicit feedback for inferring user preference: a bibliography
ACM SIGIR Forum
Display time as implicit feedback: understanding task effects
Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Relevance for browsing, relevance for searching
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Documents and queries as random variables: History and implications: Research Articles
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Towards a model of implicit feedback for Web search
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Gotta keep 'em separated: why the single search box may not be right for libraries
Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the New Zealand Chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction
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Relevance has been a difficult concept to define, let alone measure. In this paper, a simple operational definition of relevance is proposed for a Web-based library catalog: whether or not during a search session the user saves, prints, mails, or downloads a citation. If one of those actions is performed, the session is considered relevant to the user. An analysis is presented illustrating the advantages and disadvantages of this definition. With this definition and good transaction logging, it is possible to ascertain the relevance of a session. This was done for 905,970 sessions conducted with the University of California's Melvyl online catalog. Next, a methodology was developed to try to predict the relevance of a session. A number of variables were defined that characterize a session, none of which used any demographic information about the user. The values of the variables were computed for the sessions. Principal components analysis was used to extract a new set of variables out of the original set. A stratified random sampling technique was used to form ten strata such that each new strata of 90,570 sessions contained the same proportion of relevant to nonrelevant sessions. Logistic regression was used to ascertain the regression coefficients for nine of the ten strata. Then, the coefficients were used to predict the relevance of the sessions in the missing strata. Overall, 17.85% of the sessions were determined to be relevant. The predicted number of relevant sessions for all ten strata was 11%, a 6.85% difference. The authors believe that the methodology can be further refined and the prediction improved. This methodology could also have significant application in improving user searching and also in predicting electronic commerce buying decisions without the use of personal demographic data.