Аннотация
Purpose: Previous research has shown that information seekers in biomedical
domain need more support in formulating their queries. A user study
was conducted to evaluate the effec- tiveness of a metadata based
query suggestion interface for PubMed bibliographic search. The study
also investigated the impact of search task familiarity on search
behaviors and the effectiveness of the interface. Methods: A real
user, user search request and real system approach was used for the
study. Unlike tradition IR evaluation, where assigned tasks were
used, the participants were asked to search requests of their own.
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. Several performance
criteria were measured to assess the potential benefits of the experimental
interface, including users' assessment of their original and eventual
queries, the perceived usefulness of the interfaces, satisfaction
with the search results, and the average relevance score of the saved
records. Results: The results show that, when searching for an unfamiliar
topic, users were more likely to change their queries, indicating
the effect of familiarity on search behaviors. The results also show
that the interface scored higher on several of the performance criteria,
such as the ``goodness'' of the queries, perceived usefulness, and
user satisfaction. Furthermore, in line with our hypothesis, the
proposed interface was relatively more effective when less familiar
search requests were attempted. Conclusions: Results indicate that
there is a selective compatibility between search famil- iarity and
search interface. One implication of the research for system evaluation
is the importance of taking into consideration task familiarity when
assessing the effectiveness of interactive IR systems.
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