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The purpose of the study is to investigate the association of earnings and cash flows with stock prices and returns, and the impact of regulatory changes on the value relevance of accounting numbers.

The authors examine a sample of non-financial firms listed on the Belgrade Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2018 and use three regression models – price, return and differenced.

The authors find evidence that accounting earnings are more value relevant than cash flows. The authors also find negative relation of earnings changes with stock returns and argue that this is due to the lower persistence of negative earnings levels and changes. Finally, the authors find that the value relevance of accounting information in Serbia increases after the improvements in capital market regulation.

Given the empirical focus on a transition economy, the widespread applicability of the study is limited. The findings, however, call for more research on transition economies to better understand the functioning of capital markets and the way information from financial statements is incorporated into stock prices.

The results imply that policymakers in transition economies should improve the accounting and capital market regulation to provide better investor protection and to improve the capital market conditions.

The authors add to knowledge about the value relevance of accounting information in emerging and transition economies. The results could be of interest to standard setters in their efforts to better understand and improve the quality of accounting information in emerging and transition economies.

The paper aims to examine the influence of financial disclosure (FD) level and time on the value relevance of earnings, book value, and cash flows relative to three share price proxies, namely average annual share price, annual closing share price, and share price after a three-month period following the financial year-end for Jordanian companies.

The paper employs price model to examine the influence of FD level and time on the value relevance of three accounting variables relative to three share price proxies for 91 Jordanian companies (consisting of 5,460 observations) within 2004-2009.

Relative to three share price proxies, the findings proved that FD level and time have a significant influence on the value relevance of book value, but not for cash flows. Also, FD level and time have a significant influence on the value relevance of earnings relative to annual closing share price, while they are not relative to share price after a three-month period following the financial year-end. FD time has a significant influence on the value relevance of earnings relative to the average annual share price. Annual closing share price is the most reliable in indicating value relevance of accounting information.

The paper confirms that there is a shift away from earnings towards book value as the basis for firm valuation. Market participants might be able to conclude the firm value through the value relevance of accounting information influenced by company's FD.

The purpose of this paper is to specify user‐defined relevance criteria by which people select hyperlinks and pages in web searching.

A quantitative and qualitative analysis was undertaken of talking aloud data from nine web searches conducted about self‐generated topics.

Altogether 18 different criteria for selecting hyperlinks and web pages were found. The selection is constituted, by two, intertwined processes: the relevance judgment of hyperlinks, and web pages by user‐defined criteria, and decision‐making concerning the acceptance or rejection of hyperlinks and web pages. The study focuses on the former process. Of the individual criteria, specificity, topicality, familiarity, and variety were used most frequently in relevance judgments. The study shows that despite the high number of individual criteria used in the judgments, a few criteria such as specificity and topicality tend to dominate. Searchers were less critical in the judgment of hyperlinks than deciding whether the activated web pages should be consulted in more detail.

The study is exploratory, drawing on a relatively low number of case searches.

The paper gives a detailed picture of the criteria used in the relevance judgments of hyperlinks and web pages. The study also discusses the specific nature of criteria used in web searching, as compared to those used in traditional online searching environments.

In contrast to earlier studies, the most recent studies on the incremental value relevance of earnings and cash flows from operations find that both earnings and cash flows have incremental value relevance beyond each other. An interesting question that follows is whether these findings hold after controlling the extremity of earnings and cash flows. This study, therefore, aims to examine the incremental value relevance of earnings and cash flows in the following four cases: moderate earnings and moderate cash flows, moderate earnings and extreme cash flows, extreme earnings and moderate cash flows and extreme earnings and extreme cash flows.

To evaluate the incremental value relevance (information content) of earnings and cash flows for each of the four cases mentioned above, we examine the statistical significance of the slope coefficients for regression of returns on both unexpected earnings and unexpected cash flows from operations.

The results show that (i) both moderate and extreme earnings have incremental value relevance beyond both moderate and extreme cash flows, (ii) moderate cash flows have incremental value relevance beyond both moderate and extreme earnings and (iii) extreme cash flows lack incremental value relevance beyond moderate earnings; however, they (extreme cash flows) have incremental value relevance beyond extreme earnings. These results suggest that earnings and cash flows have incremental value relevance. However, only in cases when cash flows are extreme and earnings are moderate, cash flows do not possess incremental value relevance. In further analysis, we find that the value relevance for cash flows and earnings decreases when they are extreme and transitory. Moreover, the value relevance for cash flows increases when they are moderate (not extreme) and the other competing measure (earnings) is transitory and extreme.

The results support the idea that earnings and cash flows from operations complement each other in explaining variation in returns. However, when cash flows are extreme and less informative, investors rely more on earnings in firm valuation, especially when earnings are moderate. Because earnings are unlikely to persist to be permanent across the years, these results can be interpreted as indicating that cash flows and earnings information are used jointly by investors.

In contrast to previous studies, we control for the extremity of earnings and cash flows when evaluating the incremental value relevance of earnings and cash flows from operations.

One of the most effective ways information retrieval (IR) systems including Web search engines can improve relevance performance is to provide their users with tools for facilitating query expansion. Search engines such as Google provide users with keyword suggest tools. This paper aims to investigate users’ criteria in relevance judgment regarding Google’s keywords suggest tool and to see how such keywords would lead to more relevant results from the viewpoint of users.

Through a mixed method approach, quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 60 postgraduate students at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, using four different instruments (questionnaire, thinking aloud technique, query logs and interviews).

Among other criteria, the “relation between suggested keywords and the information need” (with the mean rate of 3.53 of four) was considered the most important by searchers in selecting suggested keywords for query expansion. Also, the “relation between suggested Keywords and the retrieved items” (with the mean rate of 3.62) was considered the second most important criterion in judging the relevance of the retrieved results. The participants agreed that the suggested keywords by Google improved the retrieval relevance. The content analysis of the participants’ aloud-thinking sessions and the interviews approved such findings.

This research makes a contribution to the need of designers of IR systems regarding the use of add words for query expansion. It also helps librarians how to instruct searchers with expanding their queries to retrieve more relevant results. Another contribution of the study is the identification of a number of new relevance judgment criteria for Web-based environments.

The effort in addition to relevance is a major factor for satisfaction and utility of the document to the actual user. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method in generating relevance judgments that incorporate effort without human judges’ involvement. Then the study determines the variation in system rankings due to low effort relevance judgment in evaluating retrieval systems at different depth of evaluation.

Effort-based relevance judgments are generated using a proposed boxplot approach for simple document features, HTML features and readability features. The boxplot approach is a simple yet repeatable approach in classifying documents’ effort while ensuring outlier scores do not skew the grading of the entire set of documents.

The retrieval systems evaluation using low effort relevance judgments has a stronger influence on shallow depth of evaluation compared to deeper depth. It is proved that difference in the system rankings is due to low effort documents and not the number of relevant documents.

Hence, it is crucial to evaluate retrieval systems at shallow depth using low effort relevance judgments.

The purpose of the article is to identify and analyze the challenges of business-to-business (B2B) research relevance from the point of view of top executives.

Ten in-depth interviews with top executives from different B2B industries were conducted and analyzed by using Arndt’s (1985) elements of a healthy discipline, i.e. knowledge, problems and instruments.

The findings reveal 12 challenges that characterize contemporary B2B research relevance from a top executive perspective.

The research offers genuine top executive insight. More research from different perspectives is needed to broaden the understanding of B2B research relevance.

Reflecting B2B research with the identified challenges can contribute to better research designs, narrowing the gap between B2B scholars and practitioners. Altogether, it contributes to the health of the B2B discipline. The study also introduces a new approach to analyzing research relevance by using the elements of scientific balance.

This study explored how the expression of search facets and relevance feedback (RF) by users was related to search success in interactive and automatic query expansion in the course of the search process. Search success was measured both in the number of relevant documents retrieved, whether identified by users or not. Research design consisted of 26 users searching for four TREC topics in Okapi IR system, half of the searchers using interactive and half automatic query expansion based on RF. The search logs were recorded, and the users filled in questionnaires for each topic concerning various features of searching. The results showed that the exhaustivity of the query was the most significant predictor of search success. Interactive expansion led to better search success than automatic expansion if all retrieved relevant items were counted, but there was no difference between the methods if only those items recognised relevant by users were observed. The analysis showed that the difference was facilitated by the liberal relevance criterion used in TREC not favouring highly relevant documents in evaluation.

Erroneous perceptions of relevance contribute to business projects not being successful. Although the importance of relevance is recognized in the project management literature, thus far there has not been a formal framework for addressing erroneous perceptions of relevance. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework for identifying and counteracting erroneous perceptions of relevance.

The research comprised review of the literature relating to factors that contribute to, and methods that counteract, erroneous perceptions of relevance.

Contributory factors to erroneous perceptions of relevance include cultural cognition, path dependencies, lock-ins, fads, and hype. Mediating factors include priming and questioning, counterfactual reasoning, and optimal stopping.

A classification of erroneous perceptions of relevance is introduced Type III (inept positive) errors, Type II (false negative) errors, and Type I (false positive) errors. This terminology has the advantage of already being known to academics through statistical hypothesis testing, and to practitioners through process capability studies.

The introduction of a framework for identifying and counteracting erroneous perceptions of relevance can better enable practitioners to make the selection of relevant concepts and technologies for projects – a capable process.

The originality of this research note is that it provides a framework that can be applied to increase objectivity in perceptions of relevance. The value of this research note is that it introduces a framework for identifying and counteracting erroneous perceptions of relevance before the application of methods such as cost-benefit analysis.

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of relevance ranking on Google by comparing the system's assessment of relevance with the users' views. The research aims to find out whether the presumably objective relevance ranking of Google based on the PageRank and some other factors in fact matches users' subjective judgments of relevance.

This research investigated the relevance ranking of Google's retrieved results using 34 searches conducted by users in real search sessions. The results pages 1‐4 (i.e. the first 40 results) were examined by the users to identify relevant documents. Based on these data the frequency of relevant documents according to the appearance order of retrieved documents in the first four results pages was calculated. The four results pages were also compared in terms of precision.

In 50 per cent and 47.06 per cent of the searches the documents ranked 5th and 1st, (i.e. from the first pages of the retrieved results) respectively, were most relevant according to the users' viewpoints. Yet even in the fourth results pages there were three documents that were judged most relevant by the users in more than 40 per cent of the searches. There were no significant differences between the precision of the four results pages except between pages 1 and 3.

The results will help users of search engines, especially Google, to decide how many pages of the retrieved results to examine.

Search engine design will benefit from the results of this study as it experimentally evaluates the effectiveness of Google's relevance ranking.