Most cited papers in Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
What are the most cited papers in Information Retrieval and Search Behavior?
The most cited paper in Information Retrieval and Search Behavior is "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" (Sergey Brin, Lawrence M. Page, 1998), with 16,170 citations. Next come "Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques" (4,810) and "A theory of memory retrieval." (4,280).
Showing 50 of 95 papers. Every paper with more than 722 citations is listed.
| # | Paper | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine Sergey Brin, Lawrence M. Page · Computer Networks and ISDN Systems | Apr 1998 | 16,170 |
| 2 | Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques Kalervo Järvelin, Jaana Kekäläinen · ACM Transactions on Information Systems | Oct 2002 | 4,810 |
| 3 | A theory of memory retrieval. Roger Ratcliff · Psychological Review | Mar 1978 | 4,280 |
| 4 | Probabilistic latent semantic indexing Thomas Frank Hofmann | Aug 1999 | 3,977 |
| 5 | Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data Thorsten Joachims | 23 Jul 2002 | 3,934 |
| 6 | Recommender systems Paul Resnick, Hal R. Varian · Communications of the ACM | Mar 1997 | 3,718 |
| 7 | Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence Ted E. Dunning | Mar 1993 | 2,685 |
| 8 | A Language Modeling Approach to Information Retrieval Jay M. Ponte, W. Bruce Croft · ACM SIGIR Forum | 2 Aug 2017 | 2,534 |
| 9 | The reviewing of object files: Object-specific integration of information Daniel J. Kahneman, Anne Treisman, Brian Gibbs · Cognitive Psychology | Apr 1992 | 2,256 |
| 10 | A Probabilistic Interpretation of Precision, Recall and F-Score, with Implication for Evaluation Cyril Goutte, Éric Gaussier · Lecture notes in computer science | 2005 | 2,200 |
| 11 | ArnetMiner Jie Tang, Jing Zhang, Limin Yao et al. | 24 Aug 2008 | 2,177 |
| 12 | Inside the search process: Information seeking from the user's perspective Carol Collier Kuhlthau · Journal of the American Society for Information Science | Jun 1991 | 2,176 |
| 13 | Models in information behaviour research T. D. Wilson · Journal of Documentation | Aug 1999 | 2,092 |
| 14 | Relevance weighting of search terms Stephen E. Robertson, Karen Spärck Jones · Journal of the American Society for Information Science | May 1976 | 2,091 |
| 15 | Learning to rank Zhe Cao, Tao Qin, Tie‐Yan Liu et al. | 20 Jun 2007 | 2,004 |
| 16 | Learning to rank for information retrieval Tie‐Yan Liu | 19 Jul 2010 | 1,949 |
| 17 | Empirical Studies Assessing the Quality of Health Information for Consumers on the World Wide Web Günther Eysenbach, john a. powell, Oliver Kuß et al. · JAMA | 22 May 2002 | 1,917 |
| 18 | The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface Marcia J. Bates · Online Review | May 1989 | 1,766 |
| 19 | Consumer health information seeking on the Internet: the state of the art Rebecca J. Welch Cline · Health Education Research | Dec 2001 | 1,743 |
| 20 | Search of associative memory. Jeroen G. Raaijmakers, Richard M. Shiffrin · Psychological Review | Mar 1981 | 1,628 |
| 21 | ON USER STUDIES AND INFORMATION NEEDS T. D. Wilson · Journal of Documentation | 1981 | 1,576 |
| 22 | A Study of Smoothing Methods for Language Models Applied to Ad Hoc Information Retrieval ChengXiang Zhai, John Lafferty · ACM SIGIR Forum | 2 Aug 2017 | 1,564 |
| 23 | Understanding inverse document frequency: on theoretical arguments for IDF Stephen E. Robertson · Journal of Documentation | Oct 2004 | 1,563 |
| 24 | Topic-sensitive PageRank Taher H. Haveliwala | 7 May 2002 | 1,556 |
| 25 | Modern Information Retrieval : A Brief Overview Amit Kumar Singhal | 2001 | 1,529 |
| 26 | The vocabulary problem in human-system communication George W. Furnas, Thomas K. Landauer, Louis M. Gomez et al. · Communications of the ACM | Nov 1987 | 1,515 |
| 27 | Improving retrieval performance by relevance feedback Gerard Salton, Chris Buckley · Journal of the American Society for Information Science | Jun 1990 | 1,511 |
| 28 | Focused crawling: a new approach to topic-specific Web resource discovery Soumen Chakrabarti, Martin van den Berg, Byron Dom · Computer Networks | May 1999 | 1,493 |
| 29 | IR evaluation methods for retrieving highly relevant documents Kalervo Järvelin, Jaana Kekäläinen · ACM SIGIR Forum | 2 Aug 2017 | 1,463 |
| 30 | Human Information Behavior T. D. Wilson · Informing Science The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline | 2000 | 1,458 |
| 31 | Relevance-Based Language Models Victor P. Lavrenko, W. Bruce Croft · ACM SIGIR Forum | 2 Aug 2017 | 1,445 |
| 32 | An information-theoretic perspective of tf–idf measures Akiko Aizawa · Information Processing & Management | 10 Dec 2002 | 1,438 |
| 33 | Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Norbert Schwarz, Herbert Bless, Fritz Strack et al. · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | Aug 1991 | 1,432 |
| 34 | Scatter/Gather Douglass R. Cutting, David R. Karger, Jan Ole Pedersen et al. · ACM SIGIR Forum | 2 Aug 2017 | 1,424 |
| 35 | Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback Thorsten Joachims, Laura A. Granka, Bing Pan et al. | 15 Aug 2005 | 1,409 |
| 36 | The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies David Bawden, Lyn Robinson · Journal of Information Science | 21 Nov 2008 | 1,405 |
| 37 | Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web Bernard J. Jim Jansen, Amanda Spink, Tefko Saračević · Information Processing & Management | Mar 2000 | 1,327 |
| 38 | Information filtering and information retrieval Nicholas J. Belkin, W. Bruce Croft · Communications of the ACM | Dec 1992 | 1,309 |
| 39 | Quary Expansion Using Local and Global Document Analysis Jinxi Xu, W. Bruce Croft · ACM SIGIR Forum | 2 Aug 2017 | 1,268 |
| 40 | Health Information on the Internet Gretchen K. Berland, Marc N. Elliott, Leo S. Morales et al. · JAMA | 23 May 2001 | 1,228 |
| 41 | ColBERT Omar Khattab, Matei Zaharia | 25 Jul 2020 | 1,225 |
| 42 | A study of smoothing methods for language models applied to information retrieval ChengXiang Zhai, John Lafferty · ACM Transactions on Information Systems | Apr 2004 | 1,215 |
| 43 | Two storage mechanisms in free recall Murray Glanzer, Anita R. Cunitz · Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior | Aug 1966 | 1,167 |
| 44 | Some simple effective approximations to the 2-Poisson model for probabilistic weighted retrieval Stephen E. Robertson, Steve Walker | 1994 | 1,164 |
| 45 | Analysis of a very large web search engine query log Craig D. Silverstein, Hannes Marais, Monika Rauch Henzinger et al. · ACM SIGIR Forum | Sep 1999 | 1,164 |
| 46 | Automatic image annotation and retrieval using cross-media relevance models Jiwoon Jeon, Victor P. Lavrenko, Raghaven Manmatha | 28 Jul 2003 | 1,144 |
| 47 | A Survey of Automatic Query Expansion in Information Retrieval Claudio Carpineto, Giovanni Romano · ACM Computing Surveys | 2012 | 1,112 |
| 48 | Inverted files for text search engines Justin Zobel, Alistair Moffat · ACM Computing Surveys | 25 Jul 2006 | 1,081 |
| 49 | Topic-sensitive pagerank: A context-sensitive ranking algorithm for web search Taher H. Haveliwala · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering | Jul 2003 | 1,076 |
| 50 | THE PROBABILITY RANKING PRINCIPLE IN IR Stephen E. Robertson · Journal of Documentation | Apr 1977 | 1,075 |
Citations are OpenAlex's own counts, from its 2026-09-23 snapshot, so the ranking can differ from Google Scholar or Web of Science. A paper is listed for a field when OpenAlex files it under one of the field's topics; retracted papers and papers whose citation count cannot be traced to citing works are left out, and a preprint and the article it became are shown once. Release dates are OpenAlex's: where a source gave only a month or a year, that is what is shown. How the lists are chosen.