Retrieval effectiveness of surname‐title‐word searches for known items by Academic Library users
Frederick G. Kilgour, Barbara B. Moran, John R. Barden · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1999
This article reports the findings of an experiment using a simulated title page, author surnames, and title words, one-third of which were selected by each of the three authors, to determine the frequency of one-screen displays when used to search for known items in an implied boolean retrieval system. Searches comprising surname plus one significant title word produced one-screen displays 78% of the time; surname plus two words 97% of the time; and surname plus three words 98.5%. Three-quarters of the significant words were nouns.