The effect of search task familiarity on search behaviours in biomedical search
Ying-Hsang Liu (Charles Sturt University)
CSIRO ICT IR and friendsDATE: 2013-09-16
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: CSIRO seminar room
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.
ABSTRACT:
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms have been extensively used to organize information resources in the biomedical domain. Current search systems (e.g., PubMed and MEDLINE based on MeSH) use various retrieval techniques (e.g., suggested term mapping and query expansion) to map user queries to potentially relevant documents. But the usefulness of these retrieval techniques has rarely been evaluated in interactive search systems.
In this seminar the researchers will present a user study that was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a metadata based query suggestion interface for biomedical search, and investigated the impact of search task familiarity on search behaviours. Forty-four researchers in Health Sciences participated in the evaluation - each conducted two research requests of their own, alternately with the proposed interface and the PubMed baseline. The results show that when searching for an unfamiliar topic, users were more likely to change their queries. The proposed interface was relatively more effective when less familiar search requests were attempted. Implications for the evaluation of interactive search systems will be discussed.
Findings of this study have been recently published in: Tang, M.-C., Liu, Y.-H., & Wu, W.-C. (2013). A study of the influence of task familiarity on user behaviors and performance with a MeSH term suggestion interface for PubMed bibliographic search. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 82(9), 832-843.
http://es.csiro.au/ir-and-friends/
BIO:
