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Thinking about Legal Research Problems

By Paul D. Callister, JD, MSLIS

Library Director & Associate Professor of Law

Understanding Recall and Precision

According to the following chart, the average boolean (terms and connectors) search in Westlaw's FSupp data base, at a precision level of 95% (i.e., 95% of the documents retrieved in the search results), will have a recall of 10% (i.e., only 10% of the relevant documents in the data base have been retrieved). The first 20 hits in the average boolean (terms and connectors) search will have a recall performance level of about 25% and precision of 40%. Thus, the higher the recall the lower the precision in the search results.

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