Domain expert topic familiarity and search behavior

Authors:
Sarvnaz Karimi;Falk Scholer;Adam Clark;Sadegh Kharazmi
Affiliations:
NICTA and the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia;RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia;Alfred Health, Melbourne, Australia;RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval
Year:
2011

Citing 3
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Abstract

Users of information retrieval systems employ a variety of strategies when searching for information. One factor that can directly influence how searchers go about their information finding task is the level of familiarity with a search topic. We investigate how the search behavior of domain experts changes based on their previous level of familiarity with a search topic, reporting on a user study of biomedical experts searching for a range of domain-specific material. The results of our study show that topic familiarity can influence the number of queries that are employed to complete a task, the types of queries that are entered, and the overall number of query terms. Our findings suggest that biomedical search systems should enable searching through a variety of querying modes, to support the different search strategies that users were found to employ depending on their familiarity with the information that they are searching for.