## The way how number of document calculated is changed (LUCENE-6711)
The number of documents (numDocs) is used to calculate term specificity (idf) and average document length (avdl).
Prior to LUCENE-6711, collectionStats.maxDoc() was used for the statistics.
Now, collectionStats.docCount() is used whenever possible, if not maxDocs() is used.
Assume that a collection contains 100 documents, and 50 of them have "keywords" field.
In this example, maxDocs is 100 while docCount is 50 for the "keywords" field.
The total number of tokens for "keywords" field is divided by docCount to obtain avdl.
Therefore, docCount which is the total number of documents that have at least one term for the field, is a more precise metric for optional fields.
DefaultSimilarity does not leverage avdl, so this change would have relatively minor change in the result list.
Because relative idf values of terms will remain same.
However, when combined with other factors such as term frequency, relative ranking of documents could change.
Some Similarity implementations (such as the ones instantiated with NormalizationH2 and BM25) take account into avdl and would have notable change in ranked list.
Especially if you have a collection of documents with varying lengths.
Because NormalizationH2 tends to punish documents longer than avdl.