This paper examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see... Show moreThis paper examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and non-scholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made.Our literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types.We perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. We first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi-automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type.Our data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much cross-citations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable. Show less
Wiggers, G.; Verberne, S.; Zwenne, G.J.; Loon, W.S. van 2022
This paper addresses relevance in legal information retrieval (IR). We investigate whether the conceptual framework of relevance in legal IR, as described by Van Opijnen (2017), can be confirmed in... Show moreThis paper addresses relevance in legal information retrieval (IR). We investigate whether the conceptual framework of relevance in legal IR, as described by Van Opijnen (2017), can be confirmed in practice. The research is conducted with a user questionnaire in which users of a legal IR system had to choose which of two results they would like to see ranked higher for a query and were asked to provide a reasoning for their choice. To avoid questions with an obvious answer and extract as much information as possible about the reasoning process, the search results were chosen to differ on relevance factors from the literature, where one result scores high on one factor, and the other on another factor. The questionnaire had eleven pairs of search results. A total of 43 legal professionals participated: 14 legal information specialists, 6 legal scholars and 23 legal practitioners.The results confirms the existence of domain relevance as described in the theoretical framework by Van Opijnen (2017). Based on the factors mentioned by the respondents, we can conclude that document type, recency, level of depth, legal hierarchy, authority, usability and whether a document is annotated are factors of domain relevance that are largely independent of the task context.We also investigated whether different sub-groups of users of legal IR systems (legal information specialists who are searching for others, legal scholars, and legal practitioners) differ in terms of the factors they consider in judging the relevance of legal documents outside of a task context. Using a PERMANOVA we found no significant difference in the factors reported by these groups. At this moment there is no reason to treat these sub-groups differently in legal IR systems. Show less
This paper examines citations in legal information retrieval. Citation metrics can be a factor of relevance in the ranking algorithms of legal information retrieval systems. We provide an overview... Show moreThis paper examines citations in legal information retrieval. Citation metrics can be a factor of relevance in the ranking algorithms of legal information retrieval systems. We provide an overview of the Dutch legal publishing culture. To analyze citations in legal publications, we manually analyze a set of documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited: document type, intended audience of documents, actual audience of documents and author affiliations. An analysis of 9 cited documents and 217 citing documents shows no strict separation in citations between documents aimed at scholars and documents aimed at practitioners. Our results suggest that citations in legal documents do not measure the impact on scholarly publications and scholars, but measure a broader scope of impact, or relevance, for the legal field. Show less
