Relevance distributions across Bradford Zones: Can Bradfordizing improve search?

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to describe the evaluation of the effectiveness of the bibliometric technique Bradfordizing in an information retrieval (IR) scenario. Bradfordizing is used to re-rank topical document sets from conventional abstracting & indexing (A&I) databases into core and more peripheral document zones. Bradfordized lists of journal articles and monographs will be tested in a controlled scenario consisting of different A&I databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science, 164 standardized IR topics and intellectual assessments of the listed documents. Does Bradfordizing improve the ratio of relevant documents in the first third (core) compared to the second and last third (zone 2 and zone 3, respectively)? The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if documents in the core are compared with documents in the succeeding zones. After Bradfordizing of document pools, the core has a significant better average precision than zone 2, zone 3 and baseline. This paper should be seen as an argument in favour of alternative non-textual (bibliometric) re-ranking methods which can be simply applied in text-based retrieval systems and in particular in A&I databases.