Supervised HITS Algorithm for MEDLINE Citation Ranking

How to present information retrieval results is one main problem that needs to tackle in biomedical information retrieval. A single query may retrieve a large number of results and advanced ranking algorithms are necessary to rank the results so that most relevant result is shown on the top of the list. In this paper, we explored to rank MEDLINE citations using HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search) algorithm. HITS uses web links from one page to another to rank web pages. It has proven to be successful in web search engines. We further extended HITS to supervised HITS to rank citations. Our results showed that supervised HITS algorithm significantly outperforms HITS algorithm (p<0.01). Compared with HITS, supervised HITS can improve citation ranking from 15% to more than 59% in almost all the cases we tested. Furthermore, MeSH terms outperforms text words in ranking citations, especially when HITS was applied (p<0.01).