Information About Information: Public Investments in Information Retrieval Research

Information retrieval (IR) is the science and practice of matching information seekers with the information being sought. Research on IR focuses on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of retrieval techniques and evaluating competing retrieval mechanisms. For example, Internet search engines utilize IR techniques to provide relevant information to users. In the USA, about $29 million of public support has been devoted to IR research over the past two decades, through the activities of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) program with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Here, we show empirically that research organizations worldwide that avail themselves of this information have relatively greater IR performance.