Associative Document Retrieval Techniques Using Bibliographic Information

Automatic documentation systems which use the words contained in the individual documents as a principal source of document identifications may not perform satisfactorily under all circumstances. Methods have therefore been devised within the last few years for computing association measures between words and between documents, and for using such associated words, or information contained in associated documents, to supplement and refine the original document identifications. I t is suggested in this study that bibliographic citations may provide a simple means for obtaining associated documents to be incorporated in an automatic documentation system. The standard associative retrieval techniques are first briefly reviewed. A computer experiment is then described which tends to confirm the hypothesis that documents exhibiting similar citation sets also deal with similar subject matter. Finally, a fully automatic document retrieval system is proposed which uses bibliographic information in addition to other standard criteria for the identification of document content, and for the detection of relevant information.