Coordination level matching is a ranking method originally proposed to rank documents given Boolean queries that is now several decades old. Rank fusion is a relatively recent method for combining runs from multiple systems into a single ranking, and has been shown to significantly improve the ranking. This paper presents a novel extension to coordination level matching, by applying rank fusion to each sub-clause of a Boolean query. We show that, for the tasks of systematic review screening prioritisation and stopping estimation, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art learning to rank and bag-of-words-based systems for this domain.

In the medical domain, systematic reviews are a highly trustworthy evidence source used to inform clinical diagnosis and treatment, and governmental policy making. Systematic reviews must be complete in that all relevant literature for the research question of the review must be synthesised in order to produce a recommendation. To identify the literature to screen for inclusion in systematic reviews, information specialists construct complex Boolean queries that capture the information needs defined by the research questions of the systemic review.