Discusses normalization features of good concentration measures and extends the range of values of concentration measures that are population-size-independent. Rational normalization is described, and mathematical formulas for the coefficient of variation, Pratt's measure, the Gini index, Theil's measure, and Atkinson's indices are explained. (14…

A measure for the quantification of the changes in classification under small changes in data is proposed. (Author)

Instead of leaving the user at the point where he or she receives the information from the reference storage and retrieval system, we should follow him or her to see what the impact is from the information received, how it actually affects the user's performance in his or her task. (Author/PF)

Argues that in information science we must distinguish physical, objective, or document space from perspective, subjective, or information space and holds that transformations can easily be made once these two spaces are distinguished. (FM)

Discusses "impact factor," a measure of journal impact defined by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and available in Journal Citation Reports. Argues that "impact factor" is misnamed and misused, suggesting an alternative name and interpretation of the measure, and proposes two new measures to assess the impact of…

Describes a study that used the TREC information-retrieval test collection to evaluate Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces (VIRIs). Discusses multiple-similarity measures, scaling properties, and MLE (maximum likely method), and suggests that cosine-vector and overlap measures for similarity appear to recover optimal data relationships among…

Proposes methodology for measuring potential demand for individual journals within academic discipline and illustrates this methodology with data from economics journals. The impact of potential demand on journal circulation is investigated by developing a model of journal demand that includes potential demand as an explanatory variable. Five…

Examines the retrieval effectiveness of five hierarchical clustering methods (single link, complete link, group average, Ward's method, and weighted average) as a function of indexing exhaustivity with four test collections. Evaluations of retrieval effectiveness are based on three measures of optimal retrieval performance. (Author/LRW)

Proposes that document space and query space have different structures in information retrieval and discusses similarity measures, term independence, and linear structure. Examples are given using the retrieval functions of dot-product, the cosine measure, the coefficient of Jaccard, and the overlap function. (Contains 28 references.) (LRW)

Discussion of information-retrieval test collections focuses on a study of TREC documents that used scaling and visualization of documents using a maximum-likelihood estimation method to examine the relevance of documents retrieved. Discusses clustering, similarity measures, isomorphism, and semantic relevance. (LRW)

Presents a visualization tool for information retrieval that can display two different similarity measures, angle and distance, in the same space. Discusses the visual display of information-retrieval evaluation models and develops a new retrieval means based on the visual retrieval tool, the controlling bar. (Author/LRW)

The derivation of a general retrieval effectiveness measure is investigated. Inconsistencies in the definition of relative importance are resolved, and it is shown that the influence of the assigned weight on the effectiveness measure can produce counterintuitive results. An alternative effectiveness measure provided by the Marczewski-Steinhaus…

Discusses user preferences for the representation, interpretation, and measurement of the relevance or usefulness of retrieved documents. Highlights include measurement of user judgments on documents; distance between rankings; measures of retrieval effectiveness; normalized performance measure; and the relationship of distance-based measures to…

Discussion of electronic news available on the World Wide Web focuses on a methodology of associating news documents using similarity measures and a name-phrase algorithm to create news representations that can be compared and ranked to find related news items. Considers precision over recall and interactivity with the users. (Author/LRW)

Presents a model for the geometric analysis of the relationship between information queries and information systems retrieval, and demonstrates the utility of this analysis by its application to six conventional information retrieval similarity measures and a seventh spreading activation measure. (Author/CLB)