Analysis of Footnote Chasing and Citation Searching in an Academic Search Engine
This study addresses how specific search strategies impact retrieval performance for users of academic search engines, though it appears incremental as it applies known concepts to a new dataset.
The paper analyzed user behavior for footnote chasing and citation searching in an academic search engine, finding that these strategies improved precision by 16% and 17% respectively in terms of positive interactions.
In interactive information retrieval, researchers consider the user behavior towards systems and search tasks in order to adapt search results by analyzing their past interactions. In this paper, we analyze the user behavior towards Marcia Bates' search stratagems such as 'footnote chasing' and 'citation search' in an academic search engine. We performed a preliminary analysis of their frequency and stage of use in the social sciences search engine sowiport. In addition, we explored the impact of these stratagems on the whole search process performance. We can conclude that the appearance of these two search features in real retrieval sessions lead to an improvement of the precision in terms of positive interactions with 16% when using footnote chasing and 17% for the citation search stratagem.