1. A computer-based process for retrieving information organized in documents containing information in the form of text, meta-data, citation information and potentially other types of information comprising the steps of: obtaining and labeling a selected set of documents; extracting and selecting features from each document in the selected set; representing the extracted and selected features; constructing models using parametric learning algorithms, the constructed models being capable of assigning a label to each document, the model parameters being instantiated using a first subset of the selected set of documents, and parameters being chosen by validating the corresponding model against at least a second subset of the full document set, the constructed models also being capable of assigning labels to similar documents outside a selected subset not previously given to the process of constructing models.