On the History of Evaluation in Information Retrieval
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165551507086989
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  peer-reviewed

Robertson, Stephen
Journal of Information Science
2008

Abstract:

This paper is a personal take on the history of evaluation experiments in information retrieval. It describes some of the early experiments that were formative in our understanding, and goes on to discuss the current dominance of TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference) and to assess its impact.