Bradfordizing effects

The purpose of this paper is to apply and evaluate the bibliometric method Bradfordizing for information retrieval (IR) experiments. Bradfordizing is used for generating core document sets for subject-specific questions and to re-order result sets. The method will be applied and tested in a controlled scenario of scientific literature databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science and 164 standardized IR topics. The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if articles in the core are compared with articles in the succeeding zones.