Recall Is Not a Retrieval Strategy: Choosing GraphRAG or VectorRAG by Workload
TL;DR for operators A technical assistant searching thousands of papers has two competing needs: preserve enough surrounding text to understand experimental context, and connect facts that are distributed across papers. A single retrieval score can make that choice look simpler than it is. In Gupta et al.’s Polymer Literature Scholar study,1 graph-based retrieval achieved full-corpus recall of 0.903–0.938, versus 0.717 for dense text retrieval. Yet answer accuracy remained close: 0.964–0.973 for GraphRAG and 0.960 for VectorRAG. The retriever that was substantially better at recovering designated evidence was only modestly better at producing correct answers. ...