Web search strategies: The influence of Web experience and task type

Despite a number of studies looking at Web experience and Web searching tactics and behaviours, the specific relationships between experience and cognitive search strategies have not been widely researched. This study investigates how the cognitive search strategies of 80 participants might vary with Web experience as they engaged in two researcher-defined tasks and two participant-defined information seeking tasks. Each of the two researcher-defined tasks and participant-defined tasks included a directed search task and a general-purpose browsing task. While there were almost no significant performance differences between experience levels on any of the four tasks, there were significant differences in the use of cognitive search strategies. Participants with higher levels of Web experience were more likely to use “Parallel player”, “Parallel hub-and-spoke”, “Known address search domain” and “Known address” strategies, whereas participants with lower levels of Web experience were more likely to use “Virtual tourist”, “Link-dependent”, “To-the-point”, “Sequential player”, “Search engine narrowing”, and “Broad first” strategies. The patterns of use and differences between researcher-defined and participant-defined tasks and between directed search tasks and general-purpose browsing tasks are also discussed, although the distribution of search strategies by Web experience were not statistically significant for each individual task.     

The influence of Taylor’s paper, Question-Negotiation and Information-Seeking in Libraries

This study uses bibliometric analysis and citation context analysis to identify the influence of the main concepts embedded in Taylor’s 1968 classic article entitled Question-Negotiation and Information-Seeking in Libraries. This study analyses articles published between 1969 and 2010 which cite Taylor’s article. The results show that Taylor’s article on a question-negotiation model is increasingly visible and its influence is not limited to the discipline of library and information science. Of the 14 cited concepts identified, the concept of “four levels of information needs” was cited most (31.7%), followed by “question negotiation” (20.5%) and “other concepts relating to information needs” (17.9%). The results indicate an increasing trend in the citations of “four levels of information needs” and this concept also received the most attention from information retrieval research. A decreasing trend was evident for the concept of “question negotiation” and this concept was frequently cited by reference service researchers. In addition, among the 10 citation functions, “related literature” was dominant (30.8%). Both “evidence” and “views” were in second place with the same percentage (18.7%), followed by “terms” (9.2%) and “background information” (7.2%). A decreasing trend was identified in the top three citation functions, whereas an increasing trend was observed in the “term” and “background information” functions.     

“Pyramiding: Efficient search for rare subjects”

The need to economically identify rare subjects within large, poorly mapped search spaces is a frequently encountered problem for social scientists and managers. It is notoriously difficult, for example, to identify “the best new CEO for our company,” or the “best three lead users to participate in our product development project.” Mass screening of entire populations or samples becomes steadily more expensive as the number of acceptable solutions within the search space becomes rarer.The search strategy of “pyramiding” is a potential solution to this problem under many conditions. Pyramiding is a search process based upon the idea that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. In this paper we report upon four experiments empirically exploring the efficiency of pyramiding searches relative to mass screening. We find that pyramiding on average identified the most expert individual in a group on a specific topic with only 28.4% of the group interviewed - a great efficiency gain relative to mass screening. Further, pyramiding identified one of the top 3 experts in a population after interviewing only 15.9% of the group on average. We discuss conditions under which the pyramiding search method is likely to be efficient relative to screening.     

Navigating information spaces: A case study of related article search in PubMed

The concept of an “information space” provides a powerful metaphor for guiding the design of interactive retrieval systems. We present a case study of related article search, a browsing tool designed to help users navigate the information space defined by results of the PubMed^® search engine. This feature leverages content-similarity links that tie MEDLINE^® citations together in a vast document network. We examine the effectiveness of related article search from two perspectives: a topological analysis of networks generated from information needs represented in the TREC 2005 genomics track and a query log analysis of real PubMed users. Together, data suggest that related article search is a useful feature and that browsing related articles has become an integral part of how users interact with PubMed.     

Evaluating books finding tools on social media: A case study of aNobii

A user study of aNobii was conducted with an aim to exploring possible criteria for evaluating social navigational tools. A set of measures designed to capture various aspects of the benefits provided by the tools was proposed. To test the applicability of these measures, a within-subject experimental design was adopted where fifty regular aNobii users searched alternately with three book-finding tools: browsing “friends’ bookshelves”, “similar bookshelves”, and “books by known authors”. Other than the self-report user experience and search result measures, the “choice set” model was used as a novel framework for navigational effectiveness. Further analyses were conducted to explore whether three aspects of reader preference, “preference insight”, “preference diversity”, and “reading involvement” might influence the performance of the tools.     

Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects

A growing amount of scientific research is done in an open collaborative fashion, in projects sometimes referred to as “crowd science”, “citizen science”, or “networked science”. This paper seeks to gain a more systematic understanding of crowd science and to provide scholars with a conceptual framework and an agenda for future research. First, we briefly present three case examples that span different fields of science and illustrate the heterogeneity concerning what crowd science projects do and how they are organized. Second, we identify two fundamental elements that characterize crowd science projects – open participation and open sharing of intermediate inputs – and distinguish crowd science from other knowledge production regimes such as innovation contests or traditional “Mertonian” science. Third, we explore potential knowledge-related and motivational benefits that crowd science offers over alternative organizational modes, and potential challenges it is likely to face. Drawing on prior research on the organization of problem solving, we also consider for what kinds of tasks particular benefits or challenges are likely to be most pronounced. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research and by discussing implications for funding agencies and policy makers.     

Web search engine multimedia functionality

Web search engines are beginning to offer access to multimedia searching, including audio, video and image searching. In this paper we report findings from a study examining the state of multimedia search functionality on major general and specialized Web search engines. We investigated 102 Web search engines to examine: (1) how many Web search engines offer multimedia searching, (2) the type of multimedia search functionality and methods offered, such as “query by example”, and (3) the supports for personalization or customization which are accessible as advanced search. Findings include: (1) few major Web search engines offer multimedia searching and (2) multimedia Web search functionality is generally limited. Our findings show that despite the increasing level of interest in multimedia Web search, those few Web search engines offering multimedia Web search, provide limited multimedia search functionality. Keywords are still the only means of multimedia retrieval, while other methods such as “query by example” are offered by less than 1% of Web search engines examined.     

Open source software development—Just another case of collective invention?

Do open source software (OSS) projects represent a new innovation model? Under what conditions can it be employed in other contexts? “Collective invention” regimes usually ended when a dominant design emerged. This is not the case with OSS. Firstly, the OSS community developed the institutional innovation of OSS licenses enabling OSS software to survive as a common property. Secondly, these licenses are mainly enforced by pro-socially motivated contributors. We characterize the conditions under which OSS communities develop and sustain pro-social commitments. We point out the vulnerability of these conditions to developments in patent legislation.     

p2pDating: Real life inspired semantic overlay networks for Web search

We consider a network of autonomous peers forming a logically global but physically distributed search engine, where every peer has its own local collection generated by independently crawling the Web. A challenging task in such systems is to efficiently route user queries to peers that can deliver high quality results and be able to rank these returned results, thus satisfying the users’ information need. However, the problem inherent with this scenario is selecting a few promising peers out of an a priori unlimited number of peers. In recent research a rather strict notion of semantic overlay networks has been established. In most approaches, peers are connected to other peers based on a rigid semantic profile by clustering them based on their contents. In contrast, our strategy follows the spirit of peer autonomy and creates semantic overlay networks based on the notion of “peer-to-peer dating”. Peers are free to decide which connections they create and which they want to avoid based on various usefulness estimators. The proposed techniques can be easily integrated into existing systems as they require only small additional bandwidth consumption as most messages can be piggybacked onto established communication. We show how we can greatly benefit from these additional semantic relations during query routing in search engines, such as Minerva, and in the JXP algorithm, which computes the PageRank authority measure in a completely decentralized manner.     

Recombinant search and breakthrough idea generation: An analysis of high impact papers in the social sciences

Some ideas have dramatically more impact than others – they may overturn existing paradigms or launch new areas of scientific inquiry. Where do such high impact ideas come from? Are some search processes significantly more likely to lead to breakthrough idea generation than others? In this research, we compare “high impact” papers from the social sciences with random-but-matched articles published in the same journals in the same years. We find that search scope, search depth, and atypical connections between different research domains significantly increase a paper's impact, even when controlling for the experience and prior publishing success of the author(s).     

Reflections on “Profiting from Innovation”

How innovators capture value from innovation is an enduring question. Two decades ago an effort was made in “Profiting from Innovation” to unlock this conundrum. This paper reflects on the framework offered, identifies and reviews the analytical foundations of the theory, and recognizes subsequent contributions and advancements. Linkages are also made to the strategic management literature on “resources” and “dynamic capabilities”. Elements of a Schumpeterian theory of the firm are outlined, along with a framework to assist management in designing technology commercialization strategies.     

Increasing complexity and limits of organization in the microlithography industry: implications for science-based industries

This paper tries to clarify how current science-based industries become required to respond to their rapidly advancing complexity and what kinds of new organizational forms are inevitable to cope with such complexity. The microlithography industry is used for this purpose as a typical example. The central analytical concept is “interim modularity,” defined as the modular architecture at trial-and-error development and/or prototyping phases, to effectively orchestrate the dispersion of specialized knowledge and know-how over a wide range of professionals inside and outside of corporations. Such complex tools have to be system-designed with built-in interim modularity for pre-architecture search and post-architecture finetuning.     

Neutrino oscillations: The 2007 Benjamin Franklin medal in physics presented to Arthur McDonald and Yoji Totsuka

This award recognizes two specific discoveries that constitute the experimental discovery of neutrino oscillations. In 1998 the Super-Kamiokande group under the leadership of Yoji Totsuka published their paper, “Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos” in Physical Review Letters [1]. The paper describes a deficit of muon-type neutrinos from below the detector relative to those from above. It explains this “atmospheric neutrino anomaly” as a result of transformation of some of the muon neutrinos into another type of neutrino. Four years later, the group led by Arthur McDonald described “Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory” [2] in the same journal. This experiment detected lower energy neutrinos from deep inside the Sun. By measuring all flavors of neutrinos with large rates, the SNO collaboration showed definitively that the long-standing “solar neutrino puzzle” was another manifestation of neutrino oscillations. As a result of these two experiments, we now understand that neutrinos can change identities during propagation and that both the solar and atmospheric neutrino “problems” result from the same underlying phenomenon of oscillations. A consequence of neutrino oscillations is that neutrinos, previously thought to be massless, must have a non-zero rest mass.     

Children’s interaction with cross-cultural and multilingual digital libraries: I. Understanding interface design representations

This paper reports the results of a study that examined Arabic-speaking children’s interaction with the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL). Assessment of the ICDL to Arabic-speaking children as a culturally diverse group was grounded in “representations” and “meaning” rather than in internationalization and localization. The utility of the ICDL navigation controls was judged based on the extent it supported children’s navigation. Most of the ICDL representations and their meanings were found to be highly appropriate for older children but inappropriate for younger ones. The design of the ICDL navigation controls was supportive of children’s navigation. Recommendations for assessing the cross-cultural usability of the ICDL are made and suggestions for system design improvements are provided.     

Identification of ambiguous queries in web search

It is widely believed that many queries submitted to search engines are inherently ambiguous (e.g., java and apple). However, few studies have tried to classify queries based on ambiguity and to answer “what the proportion of ambiguous queries is”. This paper deals with these issues. First, we clarify the definition of ambiguous queries by constructing the taxonomy of queries from being ambiguous to specific. Second, we ask human annotators to manually classify queries. From manually labeled results, we observe that query ambiguity is to some extent predictable. Third, we propose a supervised learning approach to automatically identify ambiguous queries. Experimental results show that we can correctly identify 87% of labeled queries with the approach. Finally, by using our approach, we estimate that about 16% of queries in a real search log are ambiguous.     

Commercial science, scientists’ values, and university biotechnology research agendas

Policies designed to promote the commercialization of university science have provoked concern that basic and publicly accessible research may be neglected. Commercialization policies have altered traditional institutional incentives and constraints, which raises new questions regarding the influence of scientists’ values on university research agendas. Our research builds on previous quantitative studies measuring changes in research outcomes and qualitative studies probing differentiation among scientists’ value orientations. We developed a nation-wide survey of 912 plant and animal biotechnology scientists at 60 research universities. Our analysis reveals that scientists’ value orientations on what we classify as “market” and “expert” science affect the amount of industry funding they receive, the proprietary nature of their discoveries, and the percentage of basic science research conducted in their laboratories. We also find that the percentage of industry funding is significantly associated with more applied research. Our findings provide insights for science and society theory and suggest that strong incentives for public-science research along with adequate public-research funds to preserve the university's vital role in conducting basic and non-proprietary research are needed to complement private-sector research investments at universities.     

Evaluating research efficiency within National R&D Programmes

Relying on efficiency analysis, we evaluate to what extent policy makers have been able to promote the establishment of consolidated and comprehensive research groups to contribute to the implementation of a successful innovation system for the Spanish food technology sector, oriented to the production of knowledge based on an application model. Using data envelopment analysis techniques that allow calculation of a generalized version of the traditional distance function model for productive efficiency, we find pervasive levels of inefficiency and a typology of different research strategies. Among these, in contrast to what has been assumed, established groups do not play the pre-eminent benchmarking role; rather, partially oriented, specialized and “shooting star” groups are the most common patterns. These results correspond with an infant innovation system, where the fostering of higher levels of efficiency and the promotion of the desired research patterns are ongoing.     

Facet analysis: The logical approach to knowledge organization

The facet-analytic paradigm is probably the most distinct approach to knowledge organization within Library and Information Science, and in many ways it has dominated what has be termed “modern classification theory”. It was mainly developed by S.R. Ranganathan and the British Classification Research Group, but it is mostly based on principles of logical division developed more than two millennia ago. Colon Classification (CC) and Bliss 2 (BC2) are among the most important systems developed on this theoretical basis, but it has also influenced the development of other systems, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and is also applied in many websites. It still has a strong position in the field and it is the most explicit and “pure” theoretical approach to knowledge organization (KO) (but it is not by implication necessarily also the most important one). The strength of this approach is its logical principles and the way it provides structures in knowledge organization systems (KOS). The main weaknesses are (1) its lack of empirical basis and (2) its speculative ordering of knowledge without basis in the development or influence of theories and socio-historical studies. It seems to be based on the problematic assumption that relations between concepts are a priori and not established by the development of models, theories and laws.     

Technology policy and global warming: Why new policy models are needed (or why putting new wine in old bottles won’t work)

In recent years, the threat of global climate change has come to be seen as one of the most serious confronting humanity. To meet this challenge will require the development of new technologies and the substantial improvement of existing ones, as well as ensuring their prompt and widespread deployment. Some have argued that the urgency of the situation requires a “Manhattan Project” or an “Apollo Program”. This paper examines why such a policy model is inappropriate, arguing that the nature of the policy context for confronting climate change necessitates a different kind of technology policy than that for building an atomic bomb or for achieving a manned lunar landing. Instead, it seeks to draw lessons from three sectors that seem to be more pertinent and where government technological development and deployment programs have been pursued with some success in the United States - namely, agriculture, biomedical research and information technology. It compares and contrasts these with the policies pursued with regard to the first two of these sectors in the United Kingdom. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications for the design of policies supporting technological development and innovation to address the problem of global climate change.     

On macro- and micro-level information in multiple documents and its influence on summarization

A well-known challenge for multi-document summarization (MDS) is that a single best or “gold standard” summary does not exist, i.e. it is often difficult to secure a consensus among reference summaries written by different authors. It therefore motivates us to study what the “important information” is in multiple input documents that will guide different authors in writing a summary. In this paper, we propose the notions of macro- and micro-level information. Macro-level information refers to the salient topics shared among different input documents, while micro-level information consists of different sentences that act as elaborating or provide complementary details for those salient topics. Experimental studies were conducted to examine the influence of macro- and micro-level information on summarization and its evaluation. Results showed that human subjects highly relied on macro-level information when writing a summary. The length allowed for summaries is the leading factor that affects the summary agreement. Meanwhile, our summarization evaluation approach based on the proposed macro- and micro-structure information also suggested that micro-level information offered complementary details for macro-level information. We believe that both levels of information form the “important information” which affects the modeling and evaluation of automatic summarization systems.