Applying Bradford’s Law of Scattering in Digital Libraries

2 Overview The purpose of this project is the application of the bibliometric Bradford Law of Scattering (BLS) for generating core document sets for subject specific questions. BLS is used to reorder result sets and discover interdisciplinary properties of result sets from distributed searches. Introduction The background of the research project is that distributed search across multiple databases over the WWW will automatically generate large and heterogeneous document sets for subject specific questions. As a result, users have to deal with a huge amount of documents from different domain, and also for specific research topics. The perceived expectations of users searching the web are that system architects should list the most relevant or important documents in the result list first and additionally create flexible environments especially for scientific retrieval. More and more approaches appear which draw on advanced methods to produce quality results. Google PageRank and Google Scholar's citation count are only two famous examples for informetric-based mechanisms applied in Internet search engines or digital libraries to satisfy user demands. Figure 1 shows the classical two levels of treatment of vagueness in information retrieval. Vagueness 1 (V1) – the mapping between user questions and document terms – will not be touched in our project (see (Petras, 2006) for a V1-treatment experiment). Our project is concentrated on treating the vagueness/heterogeneity between different document collections (mainly bibliographic databases and library catalogues) and their controlled vocabularies on a semantic level (see V2/V3 in Figure 1) which arises in distributed search.