On the use of bibliographically related titles for the enhancement of document representations

摘要

A recent article by Salton and Zhang compared some retrieval results for document collections indexed using title and abstract only with that of the same indexing enhanced by terms from bibliographically related titles. They observed that the method of adding related title terms is not sufficiently reliable. We feel that their conclusion may be overly pessimistic because it was based on small negative results using a 146-document “soft science” (information science) sample collection and without the benefit of term selection among the bibliographically related titles. On the other hand, we believe that their positive results with a 3204-document computer science collection is significant and may serve as new evidence that the method may actually work for scientific literature. Discussions on some strategies for term selection are given, as well as reasons why cited titles are useful and preferred over other types of related titles.