Does order of presentation affect users' judgment of documents?
Lorraine M. Purgailis Parker, Robert E. Johnson · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1990
User evaluation of the relevance of documents retrieved by an information system can be a useful measure of the performance of the system. The meaningfulness of this measure is, in part, determined by the extent to which it is influenced by external factors. This article examines the question of whether the order of presentation of the document citations influences the relevance judgment of the user. An experiment to test the hypothesis that order of presentation does have an effect is described. The results indicate that users are not influenced by this factor when the set of retrieved document citations has fewer than 15 members. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.