Kazuhiro Seki, Huawei Qin, Kuniaki Uehara. Impact and prospect of social bookmarks for bibliographic information retrieval. In Jane Hunter, Carl Lagoze, C. Lee Giles, Yuan-Fang Li, editors, Proceedings of the 2010 Joint International Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2010, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, June 21-25, 2010. pages 357-360, ACM, 2010. [doi]
This paper presents our ongoing study of the current/future impact of social bookmarks (or social tags) on information retrieval (IR). Our main research question asked in the present work is “How are social tags compared with conventional, yet reliable manual indexing from the viewpoint of IR performance?”. To answer the question, we look at the biomedical literature and begin with examining basic statistics of social tags from CiteULike in comparison with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) annotated in the Medline bibliographic database. Then, using the data, we conduct various experiments in an IR setting, which reveals that social tags work complementarily with MeSH and that retrieval performance would improve as the coverage of CiteULike grows.