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    Search, retrieval & recommendation· 1972

    A Statistical Interpretation of Term Specificity and Its Application in Retrieval

    Karen Spärck Jones (first author) · 1972

    Read the original

    DOI 10.1108/eb026526OpenAlex W2144211451

    On the reading lists

    Why it matters

    Established inverse document frequency, a foundational idea behind TF-IDF and BM25.

    Condensed from the expert lists' notes.

    The record

    First released
    1972 (from OpenAlex)
    Citations
    4,526 citations, as counted by OpenAlex (CC0)
    Named by
    the chatgpt list only
    Score
    0.395 · computed rank 373 · consensus 0.47, must-read 0.5, citations percentile 0.583 (1970s · all domains), awards 0, existing lists 0. Method

    Editor's notes

    • Readability check: pass: IDF, from the source; short. (AI draft (Claude), not yet reviewed, 2026-10-29)

    Data sources

    Catalogue data from OpenAlex (CC0), Crossref (CC0 metadata; no abstracts are shown), arXiv, and Papers With Code (CC BY-SA 4.0). Each count names its source. See the method.