IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamest/v47y1996i1p50-56.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A task‐oriented approach to information retrieval evaluation

Author

Listed:
  • William Hersh
  • Jeffrey Pentecost
  • David Hickam

Abstract

As retrieval systems become more oriented towards end‐users, there is an increasing need for improved methods to evaluate their effectiveness. We performed a task‐oriented assessment of two MEDLINE searching systems, one which promotes traditional Boolean searching on human‐indexed thesaurus terms and the other natural language searching on words in the title, abstract, and indexing terms. Medical students were randomized to one of the two systems and given clinical questions to answer. The students were able to use each system successfully, with no significant differences in questions correctly answered, time taken, relevant articles retrieved, or user satisfaction between the systems. This approach to evaluation was successful in measuring effectiveness of system use and demonstrates that both types of systems can be used equally well with minimal training. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Suggested Citation

  • William Hersh & Jeffrey Pentecost & David Hickam, 1996. "A task‐oriented approach to information retrieval evaluation," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 47(1), pages 50-56, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:47:y:1996:i:1:p:50-56
    DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199601)47:13.0.CO;2-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199601)47:13.0.CO;2-1
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199601)47:13.0.CO;2-1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anton van der Vegt & Guido Zuccon & Bevan Koopman, 2021. "Do better search engines really equate to better clinical decisions? If not, why not?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(2), pages 141-155, February.
    2. Pertti Vakkari & Michael Völske & Martin Potthast & Matthias Hagen & Benno Stein, 2021. "Predicting essay quality from search and writing behavior," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(7), pages 839-852, July.
    3. Johanna I. Westbrook & A. Sophie Gosling & Enrico W. Coiera, 2005. "The Impact of an Online Evidence System on Confidence in Decision Making in a Controlled Setting," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 25(2), pages 178-185, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:47:y:1996:i:1:p:50-56. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.