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think of retrieval effectiveness in terms of precision and recall.
It would have been possible to give the chapter on evaluation before any of the other material but this, in my view, would have been like putting the cart before the horse.
Before we can appreciate the evaluation of observations we need to understand what gave rise to the observations.
Hence I have delayed discussing evaluation until some understanding of what makes an information retrieval system tick has been gained.
Readers not satisfied with this order can start by first reading Chapter 7 which in any case can be read independently.
Bibliographic remarks
The best introduction to information retrieval is probably got by reading some of the early papers in the field. Luckily many of these have now been collected in book form. I recommend for browsing the books edited by Garvin[27], Kochen[28], Borko[29], Schecter[30 ] and Saracevic[31]. It is also worth noting that some of the papers cited in this book may be found in one of these collections and therefore be readily accessible. A book which is well written and can be read without any mathematical background is one by Lancaster[2]. More recently, a number of books have come out entirely devoted to information retrieval and allied topics, they are Doyle[32], Salton[33], Paice[34], and Kochen[35]. In particular, the latter half of Doyle's book makes interesting reading since it describes what work in IR was like in the early days (the late 1950s to early 1960s). A critical view of information storage and retrieval is presented in the paper by Senko[20]. This paper is more suitable for people with a computer science background, and is particularly worth reading because of its healthy scepticism of the whole subject. Readers more interested in information retrieval in a library context should read Vickery[36].
One early publication worth reading which is rather hard to come by is the report on the Cranfield II project by Cleverdon et al.[21]. This report is not really introductory material but constitutes, in my view, one of the milestones in information retrieval. It is an excellent example of the experimental approach to IR and contains many good ideas which have subsequently been elaborated in the open literature. Time spent on this report is well spent.
Papers on information retrieval have a tendency to get published in journals on computer science and library science. There are, however, a few major journals which are largely devoted to information retrieval. These are, Journal of Documentation, Information Storage and Retrieval*, and Journal of the American Society for Information Science.
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