Exploiting incoming and outgoing citations for improving Information Retrieval in the TREC 2015 Clinical Decision Support Track

We investigated two strategies for improving Information Retrieval thanks to incoming and outgoing citations. We first started from settings that worked last year and established a baseline. Then, we tried to rerank this run. The incoming citations’ strategy was to compute the number of incoming citations in PubMed Central, and to boost the score of the articles that were the most cited. The outgoing citations’ strategy was to promote the references of the retrieved documents. Unfortunately, no significant improvement from the baseline was observed