diff --git a/gensim/similarities/docsim.py b/gensim/similarities/docsim.py
index 692d76e18a..256f276394 100755
--- a/gensim/similarities/docsim.py
+++ b/gensim/similarities/docsim.py
@@ -233,6 +233,30 @@ def query_shard(args):
     return result
 
 
+def _nlargest(n, iterable):
+    """Helper for extracting n documents with maximum similarity.
+
+    Parameters
+    ----------
+    n : int
+        Number of elements to be extracted
+    iterable : iterable of list of (int, float)
+        Iterable containing documents with computed similarities
+
+    Returns
+    -------
+    :class:`list`
+        List with the n largest elements from the dataset defined by iterable.
+
+    Notes
+    -----
+    Elements are compared by the absolute value of similarity, because negative value of similarity
+    does not mean some form of dissimilarity.
+
+    """
+    return heapq.nlargest(n, itertools.chain(*iterable), key=lambda item: abs(item[1]))
+
+
 class Similarity(interfaces.SimilarityABC):
     """Compute cosine similarity of a dynamic query against a corpus of documents ('the index').
 
@@ -539,7 +563,7 @@ def convert(shard_no, doc):
             if not is_corpus:
                 # user asked for num_best most similar and query is a single doc
                 results = (convert(shard_no, result) for shard_no, result in enumerate(shard_results))
-                result = heapq.nlargest(self.num_best, itertools.chain(*results), key=lambda item: item[1])
+                result = _nlargest(self.num_best, results)
             else:
                 # the trickiest combination: returning num_best results when query was a corpus
                 results = []
@@ -548,7 +572,7 @@ def convert(shard_no, doc):
                     results.append(shard_result)
                 result = []
                 for parts in zip(*results):
-                    merged = heapq.nlargest(self.num_best, itertools.chain(*parts), key=lambda item: item[1])
+                    merged = _nlargest(self.num_best, parts)
                     result.append(merged)
         if pool:
             # gc doesn't seem to collect the Pools, eventually leading to
diff --git a/gensim/test/test_similarities.py b/gensim/test/test_similarities.py
index fbfd14880c..d25fc14da7 100644
--- a/gensim/test/test_similarities.py
+++ b/gensim/test/test_similarities.py
@@ -30,6 +30,7 @@
 from gensim.similarities import UniformTermSimilarityIndex
 from gensim.similarities import SparseTermSimilarityMatrix
 from gensim.similarities import LevenshteinSimilarityIndex
+from gensim.similarities.docsim import _nlargest
 from gensim.similarities.levenshtein import levdist, levsim
 
 try:
@@ -532,6 +533,11 @@ def testChunksize(self):
         self.assertTrue(numpy.allclose(expected, sims))
         index.destroy()
 
+    def testNlargest(self):
+        sims = ([(0, 0.8), (1, 0.2), (2, 0.0), (3, 0.0), (4, -0.1), (5, -0.15)],)
+        expected = [(0, 0.8), (1, 0.2), (5, -0.15)]
+        self.assertTrue(_nlargest(3, sims), expected)
+
 
 class TestWord2VecAnnoyIndexer(unittest.TestCase):