The Simple Scalability of Documents.

The relationship between scaling practice and scaling theory remains a controversial problem in Information Retrieval research and experimentation. This article reports a test of a general theory of scaling, i.e., Simple Scalability, applied to the stimulus domain of documents represented as abstracts. The significance of Simple Scalability is that it implies three important properties of scales: transitivity, substitutibility, and independence. The test results indicate that, with some reservations, this theory of scaling is applicable to documents. This finding is further applied to the construction of test collections for Information Retrieval research that could more sensitively measure retrieval system alterations through the use of documents scaled not merely by relevance, but rather, by preference. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.