Research on relevance: A systematic review

Relevance is one of the concepts that many researchers consider it fundamental in information retrieval. Recently, relevance has also been given attention in Iran about which multiple studies have been conducted. However, there is no clear understanding of relevance-related studies in Iran. Therefore, the current research aimed at exploring related research through a systematic review. To find the publications, questions and inclusion/exclusion criteria were initially determined. Several databases were searched using related keywords. Finally, 108 publications were selected. The software Excel was used to extract and analyze the data gathered. Publications in the field of relevance could be classified into 6 groups including recall, precision, recall and precision, relevance feedback, relevance judgment, and review resources. The results showed that most of the studies are conducted in an objective way and the researchers considered search engines more than other information retrieval systems. Moreover, the results also indicate that the recent studies are related to relevance judgment and experts in Knowledge and Information Science have been unwilling to do research on relevance feedback. While the quantitative methodology is used more frequently, the qualitative approach could also be very effective, especially in the subjective relevance and user-friendly context.