Recall cues in known-item retrieval

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of different kinds of cues on the recall of a text. Forty-four subjects read a short research paper. After a delay of three weeks, they answered questions on the paper. There were three types of cues: free cues, which encouraged unrestricted responses; bibliographic cues, which asked subjects to recall elements of bibliographic description; and structural cues, which were based on the text-linguistic structure of research reports. Recall protocols were analyzed to establish the degree to which protocol vocabulary matched index terms and propositions taken from the article. Bibliographic cues produced relatively few matching terms, and short protocols. Free cues produced many matching terms and propositions, but very long protocols containing large numbers of non-matching terms and intrusions. Structural cues produced as many matching terms and propositions as free cues, but significantly fewer non-matching terms and intrusions. Implications of these findings for known-item retrieval and the design of information system interfaces are discussed.

Known‐Item Search: Variations on a Concept

“…(Swanson et al, 1968; p.1)…;a situation in which a user is trying to find an item previously read, and consequently in which the user's memory of the item is of primary importance . (Allen, 1989; p.247)…;to reach a particular site that the user has in mind, either because they visited it in the past or…; (Broder, 2002; p.5)…”

“……;a situation in which a user is trying to find an item previously read, and consequently in which the user's memory of the item is of primary importance . (Allen, 1989; p.247)…”

Development of a text search engine for medicinal chemistry patents

“…Relevance judgments are provided by TREC and have been pre-processed to filter out patents not available in the 1'004'868 patent collection we are using. The last benchmark (B3) is used to evaluate a variant of the ad hoc search, where a single patent is targeted, using a known-item search methodology (Allen, 1989). It is constituted of 514 topics.…”

Detecting and supporting known item queries in online public access catalogs

“…Slone [19] notes that words from the title and author's name frequently help to distinguish a known item query from other types of queries. Allen [1] also showed that bibliographic cues provided by the searcher are more conducive to known-item search, as compared to freeform and structural cues. In support of this, Kilgour et al [8][9] explored how to best conduct known item queries efficiently -and concluded that the author's surname plus first and/or last title words can help to pinpoint the known item within the first 20 results over 98% of the time in their university OPAC.…”