Genre is one of the most important contextual factors in the context-driven information retrieval.The notion of genre was introduced in this paper,especially digital genre in cyber space.Expatiated current research works on the identification,description of genre,and its application in information retrieval.Furthermore,concluded some problems existed in current research,including automatic identification and annotation of genre,and proposed that genre can be used to reflect both search goal and document intent,and then serves as an unattached dimension,besides the topic dimension,to match the ...