Many of the algorithms and data structures implemented in Wumpus are discussed in the upcoming textbook Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines, to be published by MIT Press in 2010. The book's website contains sample chapters covering various topics, such as index construction, index compression, and parallel IR.

The following is a list of academic papers related to the Wumpus:

Index construction, index compression, and index maintenance Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. Index Compression is Good, Especially for Random Access. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2007). Lisbon, Portugal, November 2007. Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. Unaligned Binary Codes for Index Compression in Schema-Independent Text Retrieval Systems. University of Waterloo Technical Report CS-2006-40. Waterloo, Canada, October 2006. Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. A Document-Centric Approach to Static Index Pruning In Text Retrieval Systems. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2006). Arlington, USA, November 2006. Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Brad Lushman. Hybrid Index Maintenance for Growing Text Collections. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on Research and Development on Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006). Seattle, USA, August 2006. Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. A Hybrid Approach to Index Maintenance in Dynamic Text Retrieval Systems. In Proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2006). London, UK, April 2006. Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. Indexing Time vs. Query Time Trade-offs in Dynamic Information Retrieval Systems. Short paper in Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2005). Bremen, Germany, November 2005. Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. Memory Management Strategies for Single-Pass Index Construction in Text Retrieval Systems. University of Waterloo technical report CS-2005-32. Waterloo, Canada, October 2005. Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. Indexing Time vs. Query Time Trade-offs in Dynamic Information Retrieval Systems. University of Waterloo technical report CS-2005-31. Waterloo, Canada, October 2005. This is a long version of the CIKM paper shown above. Query processing Peter C. K. Yeung, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Stefan Büttcher. Improving Retrieval Accuracy by Weighting Document Types with Clickthrough Data. Short paper in Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007). Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 2007. Peter C. K. Yeung, Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Maheedhar Kolla. A Bayesian Approach for Learning Document Type Relevance. Short paper in Proceedings of the 29th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2007). Rome, Italy, April 2007. Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Peter C. K. Yeung. Index Pruning and Result Reranking: Effects on Ad-Hoc Retrieval and Named Page Finding. In Proceedings of the 15th Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2006). Gaithersburg, USA, November 2006. Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Brad Lushman. Term Proximity Scoring for Ad-Hoc Retrieval on Very Large Text Collections. Short paper in Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on Research and Development on Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006). Seattle, USA, August 2006. Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. Efficiency vs. Effectiveness in Terabyte-Scale Information Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 14th Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2005). Gaithersburg, USA, November 2005. [Slides] Security and multi-user issues Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. A Security Model for Full-Text Search in Multi-User Environments. In Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (USENIX FAST 2005). San Francisco, USA, December 2005. [Slides]