An evaluation of the applicability of ranking algorithms to improve the effectiveness of full‐text retrieval. I. On the effectiveness of full‐text retrieval

It is generally accepted that information retrieval based on full texts of documents will result in higher recall and lower precision compared with retrieval using paragraphs, abstracts, or controlled vocabularies. Part I of the study tested this assumption by examining the effectiveness of full‐text retrieval compared with other approaches in terms of recall and precision. Experiments were conducted on a subset of a journal‐article collection with nine search questions through the BRS search service. Full‐text retrieval was found to achieve significantly higher recall and lower precision than searches by other methods. Part II of the study will focus on how to improve the low precision of full‐text retrieval without a decrease or with a minimum decrease in recall. Document‐term‐weighting algorithms proposed in past research for automatic extractive indexing were examined as a means to improve the low precision of full‐text retrieval. © 1988 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.