Relevance reconsidered—towards an agenda for the 21st century: introduction to special topic issue on relevance research

TLDR: This issue is devoted to the topic of relevance, acknowledged as the most fundamental and much debated concern for information science, it being the tacit or explicit judgment of end-users about the output of information retrieval systems.

Abstract: The publication of this issue marks a special event for the Journal of the American Society for Information Science: the introduction of special topics issues. It seems appropriate that the first issue is devoted to the topic of relevance, acknowledged as the most fundamental and much debated concern for information science, it being the tacit or explicit judgment of end-users about the output of information retrieval systems. Early on, information scientists recognized that the concept of relevance was integral to information system design, development, and evaluation. However, there was little agreement as to the exact nature of relevance and even less that it could be operationalized in systems or for the evaluation of systems. While this lack of agreement continues to an extent at the present, some common understandings have developed, and these are reflected in the papers in this issue. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.