Citing statements: Computer recognition and use to improve retrieval

Abstract

Documents in computer-readable form can be used to provide information about other documents, i.e. those they cite.

To do this efficiently requires procedures for computer recognition of citing statements. This is not easy, especially for multi-sentence citing statements. Computer recognition procedures have been developed which are accurate to the following extent: 73% of the words in statements selected by computer procedures as being citing statements are words which are correctly attributable to the corresponding documents.

The retrieval effectiveness of computer-recognized citing statements was tested in the following way. First, for eight retrieval requests in inorganiic chemistry, average recall by search of Chemical Abstracts Service indexing and Chemical Abstracts abstract text words was found to be 50%. Words from citing statements referring to the papers to be retrieved were then added to the index terms and abstract words as additional access points, and searching was repeated. Average recall increased to 70%. Only words from citing statements published within a year of the cited papers were used.

The retrieval effect of citing statement words alone (published within a year) without index or abstract terms was the following: average recall was 40%. When just the words of the titles of the cited papers were added to those citing statement words, average recall increased to 50%.