Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Forms of Theory
1. Set of Laws: a set of statements with overwhelming empirical support. 2. Axiomatic: A set of statements divided into axioms, or propositions 3. Causal process: set of statements organized between two or more concepts is made explicit.
IS after 1950: 2
Major Trends:
1. Machine literature searching studies
Basic purposes: to determine how effectively various types of machines (microform, punched cards, optical coincidence, computers, etc.) performed in searching literature of various types
IS after 1950: 3
2. Index language performance
Basic purposes (note similarity to LS):
Determine the performance of various indexing languages (such as classification systems, free language, thesauri, KWIC, KWOC, professional indexing, etc.) and compare them to each other. Definite trend early on and still very important today with studies of Web search engines
IS after 1950: 6
Web search engine performance:
Methods vary but most are based on methods similar to those in indexing and retrieval performance:
1. Comparisons of search engines 2. Comparisons of retrieval results (count) 3. Occasionally, some attention to recall and precision Expect a lot more work in this area in the future