Talk:Information retrieval

Huge gaps in article
This article is missing major concepts. For example, there is no mention of page rank (!) or the receiver operating characteristic in evaluation, or multimedia IR. I agree precision/recall -- ROC -- evaluation might do better in a separate page. 67.101.41.94 (talk) 18:04, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

A very major issue of this article is the fact that the second half of information retrieval is completely ignored: navigation (or browsing). A huge number of IR studies even show that navigation is by far the more important retrieval method. As a hybrid method, faceted search/navigation is also missing. Information retrieval is not the same as search! Novoid (talk) 16:09, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

If you look at the study of information retrieval (e.g., conferences like the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval), you'll see that navigation and browsing don't get that much attention. I happen to be passionate about Human–computer information retrieval myself, but I think the content in this entry is fairly representative of the field. There are gaps, but I wouldn't call them huge. Dtunkelang (talk) 13:32, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Break IR down into subfields
One thing I missed when I read this article was that information retrieval was not broken down into smaller subfields. It might be helpful to break this field down when developing the article further.

Nybbles 10:29, 17 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't think there subfields in IR. They are more likely called tasks. i⋅am⋅amz3 (talk) 01:25, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Glimpse / Webglimpse
They are listed in open-source IR systems but according to their respective websites, their licenses do not seem to be open-source anymore. I don't know if they were open-source or not in the past, so I didn't remove them. Maybe someone with more knowledge on the subject could take care of the issue ? --Lastrainson 09:57, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

New article request
Hi there, I'd like to suggest a new article on the full history of information handling/management/techonology (details). I'm not knowledgeable enough to do it myself, but contributors here probably are. Thanks, JackyR | Talk 18:04, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Information scent
Also add an article about information scent, as also noted on information foraging. Jidanni (talk) 18:35, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Term Discrimination
I am going to start a new page on TermDiscrimination. I am a noob, so can some one give me some pointers on how to get this article linked to? Dspattison (talk) 18:29, 7 January 2008 (UTC)


 * That article is stub. My take on this is to merge FTS, concept search and that article into IR article under a section that would be called "Approaches" i⋅am⋅amz3 (talk) 01:03, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

ASIS&T Award of Merit
The ASIS&T Award of Merit, established in 1964 by the Delaware Valley Chapter, is now the Society's highest honor, bestowed annually to an individual who has made a noteworthy contribution to the field of information science, including the expression of new ideas, the creation of new devices, the development of better techniques and outstanding service to the profession of information science. The Award of Merit is sponsored directory by the Society.

Past recipients of the Award of Merit:


 * 2008 	Clifford Lynch
 * 2007 	Donald H. Kraft
 * 2006 	Blaise Cronin, ARIST editor, Indiana University
 * 2005 	Marcia Bates
 * 2004 	Howard D. White
 * 2003 	Nicholas J. Belkin
 * 2002 	Karen Sparck Jones
 * 2001 	Patrick G. Wilson
 * 2000 	Donald R. Swanson
 * 1999 	Jose Marie Griffiths
 * 1998 	Henry Small
 * 1997 	Dagobert Soergel
 * 1996 	Jean Tague-Sutcliffe
 * 1995 	Tefko Saracevic
 * 1994 	Harold Borko
 * 1993 	Robert M. Hayes
 * 1992 	Robert S. Taylor
 * 1991 	Roger K. Summit
 * 1990 	P. Atherton Cochrane
 * 1989 	Gerard Salton
 * 1988 	F. Wilfrid Lancaster
 * 1987 	Donald W. King
 * 1986 	Bernard M. Fry
 * 1985 	Robert L. Chartrand
 * 1984 	Joseph D. Becker
 * 1983 	Dale B. Baker
 * 1982 	Andrew A. Aines
 * 1981 	Herbert S. White
 * 1980 	Claire K. Schultz
 * 1979 	Frederick Kilgour
 * 1978 	Calvin N. Mooers
 * 1977 	Allen Kent
 * 1976 	Laurence Heilprin
 * 1975 	Eugene Garfield
 * 1974 	Manfred Kochen
 * 1973 	Jesse H. Shera
 * 1972 	Phyllis Richmond
 * 1971 	Jerold Orne
 * 1970 	Cyril W. Cleverdon
 * 1968 	Carlos A. Cuadra
 * 1967 	Robert Fairthorne
 * 1966 	Mortimer Taube
 * 1965 	Charles P. Bourne
 * 1964 	Hans Peter Luhn

Cited by --KYPark (talk) 19:22, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Major figures

 * Thomas Bayes
 * Claude E. Shannon
 * Gerard Salton
 * Hans Peter Luhn
 * W. Bruce Croft - Cambridge
 * Karen Spärck Jones - Cambridge
 * C. J. van Rijsbergen - Cambridge
 * Stephen E. Robertson - Cambridge
 * Martin Porter - Cambridge


 * My comment

The first two, Bayes and Shannon, were not contributing to information retrieval (hence rather irrelevant) but statistical inference in general.

The next two, Luhn and Salton, were frontal, computational and experimental, helplessly suffering from lack of decent relevant IR theories.

The rest are Cambridge alumni or affiliates. They were especially keen on statistical approaches, which make up a part of what IR is all about as an average science.

The keyword web and the citation web are the two driving wheels of IR, not to mention any information search or research as well as (esp. new) encyclopedism. Hence the pivotal role of hypertext in principle and practice, around which a variety of statistical and computational methods may center. Frankly, the major figures, as biased as above, have little to do with such a central role obvious since late 1970s. --KYPark (talk) 21:21, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Question answering
The question answering article begins "In information retrieval, question answering (QA) is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language." Yet there is no mention of question answering in this article. pgr94 (talk) 17:49, 21 June 2010 (UTC)


 * My understanding is that boolean keyword search, Full-text search and Concept search and Question answering are on a continuum that is in the field of IR. This includes technics dialog / exploratory technics explained in Human–computer information retrieval. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iamamz3 (talk • contribs) 00:59, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Graphic Help
There's a little mistake in adaptation of Kuropka's categorization. It should be "Binary Independence", instead of "Binary Interdependence". I don't know how to edit this part (I'm pretty new to this and it's a graphic). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.176.147.82 (talk) 02:42, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I propose that Webometrics be merged into this article, or one of its peers which tackles Web specific information retrieval metrics.

The article seems slim to me. It seems poorly referenced, with many researchers appearing in more than one reference at the same time. Most of the see-also links seem to be supporting the article, rather than leading to more information. The article also appears to link only to the kinds of other articles, which I now gather it should be merged into. Its prime content also has to do with "web impact", which is a form of information retrieval metric; an "impact factor".

As such, please consider Webometrics for merge into this article, and others near it, as the case may be. Decoy (talk) 20:20, 3 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi, Webometrics is much more related to bibliometrics. Information retrieval is the posh academic term for search engines, webometrics is more about rating an organization based on web link structures pointing to the organization's web site. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.161.6.1 (talk) 11:25, 4 June 2015 (UTC)


 * As I commented on Talk:Webometrics, certainly Webometrics can be used as a technique in information retrieval, in addition for general research or other purposes. But the content of that article is not suitable for a general overview of information retrieval, especially given that it is specific to the World Wide Web and is at most about one class of techniques.  Certainly even if it was mentioned in the main information retrieval article it would also need its own page with a more detailed explanation.  I added Webometrics to Category:Information retrieval techniques and removed the merge tag.  There are plenty more references which could be used to improve Webometrics as a standalone article. -- Beland (talk) 16:42, 14 June 2015 (UTC)

Deletion nomination for Gain (information retrieval)
The article Gain (information retrieval) has been nominated for deletion at Articles for deletion/Gain (information retrieval). As no one has yet commented on the nomination, I'm posting this message here in hopes of attracting editors familiar with the subject matter. —Psychonaut (talk) 08:47, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

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Focus is too narrow
I think this aspect could do with more fleshing out, with regard to the processes involved and as subtopic of library or information science. The article seems to be heavily focussed on how and what computers do, rather than the principles and key elements behind making the information retrievable. I'm just going to add a source in Further reading for now, as a starting point for further expansion. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 08:11, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Reference Zhu, Mu (2004). "Recall, Precision and Average Precision" outdated
It seemed difficult to find the reference mentioned above (which is unfortunate, as the equation referencing it is in turn referenced by scikit-learn, a commonly used implementation). According to Mr. Zhu,

If you are looking for an early working paper, "Recall, Precision, and Average Precision", cited by an article on "Information Retrieval" from Wikipedia, please refer to and/or cite this published paper instead.