Back to the reading lists

    Search, retrieval & recommendation· 1994

    Okapi at TREC-3

    Stephen E. Robertson (first author) · 1994

    Read the original

    DOI 10.6028/nist.sp.500-225.routing-cityOpenAlex W7000759487

    On the reading lists

    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 logoSemantic 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 logoSemantic Scholar (used under its non-commercial API licence). Each count names its source. See the method.