Investigating the effectiveness of methodological elements in ranking the results based on their relevance and methodological validity

The goal of evidence-based medicine is helping clinical professionals to obtain relevant and valid information to make appropriate clinical decisions. Therefore, to meet the information needs of health professionals, information retrieval systems should facilitate access relevant and also methodologically valid.

The current research uses the quasi-experimental method of one group pre-test - post-test in order to achieve the research goals. The research community was made up all the clinical trial articles available in the Cochrane database until the end of 2018.

The results of the present study showed that among the research variables, the words of the reviewers' comments along with the abstract had the greatest impact on the ranking. These results showed that the Cochrane reviewers' comments can be a suitable tool for use in ranking systems based on relevance and validity. Also, the results of this research showed that it is possible to rank the methodological validity and combine it with relevance by using the internal and external elements of the articles.

This research distinguished the types of words used in the text of scientific articles and its effect on improving the ranking based on relevance and methodological validity. In retrieval systems based on natural language, more emphasis has been placed on the totality of the text and less attention has been paid to the contribution of vocabulary types in explaining the relevance of articles. The findings of this research highlighted, once again, the difference of vocabulary types in explaining relevance and methodological validity and revealed the necessity of determining the target vocabulary set in all types of searches.