Information retrieval aims to retrieve the documents that answer users’ queries. A typical search process consists of different phases for which a variety of components have been defined in the literature; each one having a set of hyper-parameters to tune. Different studies focused on how and how much the components and their hyper-parameters affect the system performance in terms of effectiveness, others on the query factor. The aim of these studies is to better understand information retrieval system effectiveness. This paper reviews the literature of this domain. It depicts how data analytics has been used in IR to gain a better understanding of system effectiveness. This review concludes that we lack a full understanding of system effectiveness related to the context which the system is in, though it has been possible to adapt the query processing to some contexts successfully. This review also concludes that, even if it is possible to distinguish effective from non-effective systems for a query set, neither the system component analysis nor the query features analysis were successful in explaining when and why a particular system fails on a particular query.