Evaluations of context-based co-citation searching

Since machine-readable documents have become widespread, some recent studies have proposed retrieval methods using a combination of citation linkage and its context. In the case of co-citation linkage, there have been attempts to discern ‘strong’ co-citations from ‘weak’ ones by examining the positions of citations in a document. However, this promising concept has not yet been sufficiently evaluated, and it remains unclear whether search performance is significantly improved. Therefore, this paper explores the effects of using co-citation context more deeply and more widely by comparing the search performance of six retrieval methods, which differ as to whether co-citation context and normalization using cited frequency are used. For empirically evaluating the effects, a special test collection was created from CiteSeer Metadata, and the search performances of the six retrieval methods were compared by two IR metrics (AP and nDCG). The main conclusions of this paper are: (1) co-citation context has a positive effect on co-citation searching; (2) the normalization technique using cited frequency is useful for context-based co-citation searching; (3) approaches of using co-citation context tend to affect the characteristics of search performance.