Abstract
All of the methods currently used to evaluate information retrieval (IR) systems have limitations in their ability to measure how well users are able to acquire information. We utilized an approach to assessing information obtained based on the user's ability to answer questions from a short-answer test. Senior medical students took the ten-question test and then searched one of two IR systems on the five questions for which they were least certain of their answer. Our results showed that pre-searching scores on the test were low but that searching yielded a high proportion of answers with both systems. These methods are able to measure information obtained, and will be used in subsequent studies to assess differences among IR systems.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 164-170 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | SIGIR Forum (ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1995 |
Event | Proceedings of the 18th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval - Seattle, WA, USA Duration: Jul 9 1995 → Jul 13 1995 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Management Information Systems
- Hardware and Architecture