Abstract Multisource web news portals provide various advantages such as richness in news content and an opportunity to follow developments from different perspectives. However, in such environments, news variety and quantity can have an overwhelming effect. New‐event detection and topic‐tracking studies address this problem. They examine news streams and organize stories according to their events; however, several tracking stories of an event/topic may contain no new information (i.e., no novelty). We study the novelty detection (ND) problem on the tracking news of a particular topic. For this purpose, we build a Turkish ND test collection calledBilNov‐2005and propose the usage of three ND methods: a cosine‐similarity (CS)‐based method, a language‐model (LM)‐based method, and a cover‐coefficient (CC)‐based method. For the LM‐based ND method, we show that a simpler smoothing approach, Dirichlet smoothing, can have similar performance to a more complex smoothing approach, Shrinkage smoothing. We introduce a baseline that shows the performance of a system with random novelty decisions. In addition, a category‐based threshold learning method is used for the first time in ND literature. The experimental results show that the LM‐based ND method significantly outperforms the CS‐ and CC‐based methods, and category‐based threshold learning achieves promising results when compared to general threshold learning.