Relevance Judgment and user's Criteria in document selection and evaluation: Riding's cognitive style analysis approach

this study tends to investigate the impact of cognitive style on document relevance judgment in document selection and evaluation process. this is an applied research conducted in survey method. Humanities & social Science – Basic and engineering science students of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran were applied as test persons in Riding’s cognitive style analysis in order to distinguish two cognitive style groups (Holistic and Analytic. Data were gathered through Simulated work tasks and individual relevance judgment sessions. the results of the research demonstrated that there were some but not significant differences between the two cognitive style’s grading of relevance judgment. In addition, while Holistics failed in evaluating “partial relevance” documents, they needed to get more support from IR system. Furthermore, both Holistic and Analytic persons almost agreed on “relevant” documents. Conversely, the least agreement occurred in “partial relevant” documents.Value: It is expected that the results of the study will help search engine and web designers to enhance a user-personalized interface in order to support interactive information retrieval systems