On the reading lists
- #201 in the Top 500 (2026 edition)
- #11 in Search, retrieval & recommendation (2026 edition)
Why it matters
Landmark development of BM25-style term weighting, still a dominant lexical retrieval baseline.
Condensed from the expert lists' notes.
The record
- First released
- 1994 (from oracle lists)
- Citations
- 2,963 citations, as counted by
Semantic Scholar (non-commercial licence) - Named by
- both expert lists
- Score
- 0.533 · computed rank 201 · consensus 0.82, must-read 1, citations percentile 0.533 (1990s · retrieval), awards 0, existing lists 0. Method
Editor's notes
- Readability check: fail: A competition report; BM25 is better learned from a retrieval textbook. (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), and
Semantic Scholar (used under its non-commercial API licence). Each count names its source. See the method.