{"doi":"10.1007/s11192-023-04681-x","title":"Academic information retrieval using citation clusters: in-depth evaluation based on systematic reviews","abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The field of science mapping has shown the power of citation-based clusters for literature analysis, yet this technique has barely been used for information retrieval tasks. This work evaluates the performance of citation-based clusters for information retrieval tasks. We simulated a search process with a tree hierarchy of clusters and a cluster selection algorithm. We evaluated the task of finding the relevant documents for 25 systematic reviews. Our evaluation considered several trade-offs between recall and precision for the cluster selection. We also replicated the Boolean queries self-reported by the systematic reviews to serve as a reference. We found that citation-based clusters’ search performance is highly variable and unpredictable, that the clusters work best for users that prefer recall over precision at a ratio between 2 and 8, and that the clusters are able to complement query-based search by finding additional relevant documents.</jats:p>","journal":"Scientometrics","year":2023,"id":6974,"datarank":0.42498200160843247,"base_score":2.833213344056216,"endowment":2.833213344056216,"self_citation_contribution":0.42498200160843247,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.42498200160843247,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":16,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.0426,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-03-21","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":63614,"name":"Suzan Verberne","orcid":"0000-0002-9609-9505","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":235,"name":"Nees Jan van Eck","orcid":"0000-0001-8448-4521","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":236,"name":"Ludo Waltman","orcid":"0000-0001-8249-1752","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":63613,"name":"Juan Pablo Bascur","orcid":"0000-0002-4077-1024","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":77,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}