Metrics for the scope of a collection: Research Articles

  • Authors:
  • Robert B. Allen;Yejun Wu

  • Affiliations:
  • College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104;College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Some collections cover many topics, while others are narrowly focused on a limited number of topics. We introduce the concept of the “scope” of a collection of documents and we compare two ways of measuring it. These measures are based on the distances between documents. The first uses the overlap of words between pairs of documents. The second measure uses a novel method that calculates the semantic relatedness to pairs of words from the documents. Those values are combined to obtain an overall distance between the documents. The main validation for the measures compared Web pages categorized by Yahoo. Sets of pages sampled from broad categories were determined to have a higher scope than sets derived from subcategories. The measure was significant and confirmed the expected difference in scope. Finally, we discuss other measures related to scope. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.