Information Retrieval and Informetrics: The Application of Informetric Methods in Digital Libraries

The search for scientific literature in scientific information systems is a discipline at the intersection between information retrieval and digital libraries. Recent user studies show two typical weaknesses of the classical IR model: ranking of retrieved and maybe relevant documents and the language problem during the query formulation phase. At the same time traditional retrieval systems that rely primarily on textual document and query features are stagnating for years, as it could be observed in IR evaluation campaigns such as TREC or CLEF. Therefore alternative approaches to surpass these two problem fields are needed. Recent developments in the area of applied informetrics show very promising effects by using long-known informetric and bibliometric methods like the analysis of power-law distributions described by Lotka's, Zipf's or Bradford's laws. This contribution will concentrate on the description of the different approaches in digital libraries, information retrieval, and informetrics to give a broad overview on current methods in applied informetrics. This article contains: 1. Introduction 2. Digital Libraries 3. User Estimation of Relevance and Computer-Generated Ranking 4. Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems 5. Informetrics 6. Discussion