Considerable evidence exists to show that the use of term relevance weights is beneficial in interactive information retrieval. Various term weighting systems are reviewed. An experiment is then described in which information retrieval users are asked to rank query terms in decreasing order of presumed importance prior to actual search and retrieval. The experimental design is examined, and various relevance ranking systems are evaluated, including fully automatic systems based on inverse document frequency parameters, human rankings performed by the user population, and combinations of the two.