A collection of fundamental research papers in information retrieval, plus very good introductory material to the book as a whole, and to each section, by the editors. A basic resource for understanding information retrieval.
Although more targeted at a Computer Science audience, it does a good job of introducing IR concepts and principles. It comes with a book website, which contains an HTML copy of the book with figures and tables missing. Here's a local copy, including figures and tables.
Although it has a slight Computer Science, the text does not enter in details of data structures and algorithms but instead addresses concepts, principles, and the mathematical model underlying Information Retrieval. My only gripe is that the chapters have different authors, so the level of detail and the notation vary a lot, plus there is some overlapping between chapters.
This book won the ASIS Best Information Science Book Award for 2000. It offers a good overview of IR, maybe with too much technical detail.
The overview of the "cognitive approach" to Information Retrieval.
This book won the ASIS Best Information Science Book Award for 1998. It is a general overview of IR, and offers good references.
Good general introductory text to all of information retrieval, well written and at an appropriate level for this course. The examples are from health care applications, but the book covers general principles and pays particular attention to the problem of designing good evaluation experiments.
As the subtitle suggests, this book concentrates on algorithms and on practical aspects of implementing IR systems. Although mainly targeted at a CS audience, the algorithms are explained in plain English and with many examples, so they are relatively easy to understand by anyone.
A quite recent book that seems to cover well most aspects of building IR systems.
A collection of lectures on IR given at the Third European Summer-School, ESSIR 2000.
It discusses the decisions that need to be taken when building an Information Retrieval system, manual or automatic. Used by the first author as textbook for his course on "Organizing Information". A book webpage is under construction.
Not a text on IR as a whole, but useful for several of its chapters. Provides a general review of the topic.
A very technical book on data structures and algorithms for IR. Much of the code (in C) is available at ftp://sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl/pub/users/rbaeza/irbook/. Recommended if you want to build an IR system. The chapters are written by various authors, so the level of detail and the notation varies widely.
The book discusses how the electronic technology has changesd the skills and strategies used for manipulating, storing, and retrieving information.
The recent edition of a classic book on the Information Search Process.
ASIS Best Information Science Book Award for 1998. A bit old, but highly cited.
A standard, good text on the topic, somewhat technically and theoretically oriented, but with excellent introductions to some essential IR concepts. An electronic version is available on the Web. Here's a local copy.
Has some useful sections on automatic IR systems, and integrates IR within an overall text-processing framework.
Quite old now, but still a very standard text for IR, heavily focused on technical issues of representation and retrieval techniques. It introduces many of the ideas that are otherwise only to be found in the papers and technical reports of Salton's group at Cornell.
The classic work on this topic. Very good chapters on different aspects of experimentation in IR, by very good people.
An IR system is an interactive system, so a book on the design and evaluation of interactive systems is essential background reading. Also see the complementary website.
It explains the mathematical foundations of the statistical approach to Information Retrieval.
As the subtitle says, it's an introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition.
Actually, any Statistics books will do. Note that the ones for Social Sciences typically give clearer examples and use more intuition, the ones for Engineering use more math and more obscure examples. In addition, if you're going to do a user study, you can use a book on "Experimental Design".
Reprinted as "The Design of Everyday Things". A wonderful classic on designing "things". (An IR system is a thing :-).)
Note. You get free access to most of these via the Rutgers library.
This is a standard journal for substantial, archival work in IR, with a computer science emphasis. Experiment and research in IR. Quarterly.
One of the best available journal dealing with operational interactive IR systems. At least some of the articles are reviewed.
A standard international journal, with significant work in IR in every issue. Experiment and research in IR. Bi-monthly.
A new journal, edited by Paul Kantor and Stephen Robertson, whose stated aims are to publish high quality technical work in IR. Quarterly.
A good, standard publication source for information science, with much good work in IR. Experiment and research in IR. About 14 issues/year.
Published by Aslib. Long one the standard and most important journals in IR, which avoids the US bias of JASIS. Experiment and research in IR. Quarterly.
This is the standard place for publication of research papers with a computer science orientation toward IR. Very strictly refereed. Proceedings available at the ACM Digital Library (via Rutgers library webpage).
The quality of the papers in this meeting is highly variable, but it is always worth looking at it. It is just about the only place where person-oriented research in IR is reported.
The first of this series was in 1996. Although the standard of papers is variable, this meeting is developing into the standard source for papers on digital libraries (which often means papers on IR). There is some emphasis on reporting on systems and prototypes, which makes it different from the SIGIR Conferences.
This is another conference on digital libraries, but with less high quality papers than in the ACM DL `nn series. More focus on policy and economic issues, and also on database and other technical issues. Some IR content.
Most papers in these proceedings are not terribly high-level, but there are always a few of interest. This is probably the best conference to report on new work in operational IR systems.
The eighth in this series will be published later this spring. Although not refereed, it has become a standard place for publication of high-quality IR evaluation papers. The most important new results in computer-oriented IR are now first published in this forum.
The standard review source in the field.
An irregular series of grouped articles on special topics within the Journal. A number of articles on some topic of current interest are put together by a special editor for that topic.
An irregular series of review articles published in this journal. Very high quality.
A good, irregular series of review articles.
Good indexing service, with a rather pronounced USA bias.
Good indexing service, with better international coverage than ISA.
The home page for ACM SIGIR has a great deal of information on it, with links to many other resources in information retrieval.