Weighting and Ranking Features
EBSCOhost employs a proprietary relevancy ranking system that considers three factors: density, prominence, and frequency of keywords.
- Density is determined by counting the number of times the search term appears in a given document. Documents with more instances of the term will be weighted more heavily.
- Prominence refers to the ability of the algorithm to understand where the search term is located in a document, and to weigh the instance of the term appropriately. Use of any field limiters such as TI (Title) or SU (Subject Terms) will remove this metric from the calculations.
- Finally, frequency is determined by the number of times the term appears in the entire database. If a term is very common, the algorithm will consider it less important.
Relevancy analysis cannot be disabled and is visible in all display modes. It is also the default sorting method, so users uncomfortable with EBSCOhost’s algorithm will find themselves limited to date and "source" sorting in Advanced and Basic modes, and only date sorting in Visual Search.
