Relationships between categories of relevance criteria and stage in task completion

The process of information seeking involves a varied set of tasks and interactions. Exactly how the information seeker judges the relevance of what is retrieved has been a renewed area of interest in information retrieval studies. Various studies have identified facets or categories of relevance which go beyond simple topical relevance, and there has been some recent research on how these multi-dimensional concepts of relevance relate to the information seeking process. This study extends research on the relationship between multi-dimensional user relevance assignments and stage in the process of completing a task. Our results concur with and add detail to previous studies and suggest that users consistently identify relevance criteria beyond topical relevance. Our results also find a statistically significant relationship between the users’ stage in the search process and relevance categories chosen using the convenience sample chosen for this study.