Relationships between categories of relevance criteria and stage in task completion Arthur R. Taylor a,c, * , Colleen Cool b , Nicholas J. Belkin a , William J. Amadio c a School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071, USA b Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Queens College, CUNY, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367, USA c Department of Computer Information Systems, Rider University, 2083 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, USA Received 10 February 2006; received in revised form 12 September 2006; accepted 13 September 2006 Available online 2 November 2006 Abstract 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 stud- ies 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. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Relevance; Information retrieval; Information search process; Relevance criteria; Relevance categories; Multi-dimensional relevance 1. Introduction The concept of relevance and its role in information retrieval (IR) has been a complex subject which has received continual attention virtually since the inception of information science as a distinct domain. The nat- ure of understanding of relevance has changed along with the different paradigms of IR over the years. Recent 0306-4573/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2006.09.008 * Corresponding author. Address: School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071, USA. Tel.: +1 908 334 7076. E-mail addresses: artaylor@eden.rutgers.edu (A.R. Taylor), ccool@qc.edu (C. Cool), nick@belkin.rutgers.edu (N.J. Belkin). Information Processing and Management 43 (2007) 1071–1084 www.elsevier.com/locate/infoproman