Relevance sorting for database searches

摘要

An method for searching a database and sorting the results of a search to identify important, authoritative, and seminal records and to bring them to the front of the search result. The method comprises a means of rapidly identifying references to other records within each record and an algorithm that uses those references to identify the seminal, authoritative, and important cases. The invention may be used in legal research, permitting researches to find additional seminal documents that are missed by a standard Boolean search and to sort search results by seminality so that they can rapidly find the seminal case in an area of law.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method of sorting a set of records comprising a list of responsive documents returned by a search, said search including a step of performing a query, said method comprising the steps of:
for each record in said list of responsive documents, collecting, from a citation table, the number of times each said record in said list of responsive documents is referenced by records in another set of records; wherein said another set of records is a set of records contained in a database; sorting said list of responsive documents into an order based upon said number of times each said record of said list of responsive documents is referenced in records of said another set of records; and communicating results of said sorting step, in an order corresponding to the order in which records of said set of records are placed by said sorting step, to a user.