Intellectual Structure of Relevance Articles in Information Retrieval field in Webof Science Database (2009-2018)

This research attempts to reveal the intellectual structure of “Relevance” articles in order to identify the top authors, countries and topical clusters, via co-word, co-author, and science visualization tools.

This is application research which is conducted by scientometric methodology. Population comprises 2530 records in the field of Relevance during 2009-2018, which had been retrieved from Web of Science. PreMap software is used for homogenization of words, and VOSviewer, and Bibexcel are used for science visualization.

Findings indicate that the most articles were published in 2015 with 293 titles. The scientific map of co-authorship led to creation of 6 clusters. The top authors in scientific co-authorship were Huang, Jose, De rijke, Zuccon, Song, and Scholer. The top countries in scientific co-authorship were USA, China, England, Canada, India, and France. Use of co-word analysis led to the creation of 6 topical clusters in the field of Relevance, including among others: Information retrieval, Search engines, and Relevance feedback.

The upward trend of scientific outputs in the field of Relevance during recent years indicates the increasing importance of this field in Library and Information Science. The results indicate that the researchers as well as studying the general and traditional principles of Relevance field have not been unaware of new developments in this field and studied both of them at the same time.