Topic 4    Relevance

Relevance is an important aspect of information quality. However, it is not a property of the information itself. Rather its importance is in its relationship to the need you have identified and for which you are searching for information. The information in front of you may be of high quality but not actually relevant to the question you are asking nor to the scope of your search. There are a number of ways in which it may or may not be relevant to your needs. Some important ones are, for example:

• Level – it may be too detailed/specialised or too general/simple for the level at which you are working,
• Emphasis – it may not contain the kind of information you are seeking – this is often a question of emphasis, and one which, in the case of a journal article for example, may not easily be identifiable from an abstract,
• Geographic – it may relate to countries or areas you are not interested in at this time.

You can probably think of others that relate to your own subject field. Go to the next page to see how one student's searching caused him some problems with relevance.