Purpose – The goals of this study are: to evaluate the merits of a newly developed health information retrieval system; to investigate users' search strategies when using the new search system; and to study the relationships between users' search strategies and their prior topic knowledge....

Purpose – The scientific literature has played an important role in the dissemination of new knowledge throughout the past century. However, the increasing numbers of scientific articles being published in recent years has intensified the perception of information overload for users attempting...

Purpose – Conducting academic searches within online digital libraries can be a difficult task due to the complexity of the searcher’s information need. The interfaces for such digital libraries commonly use simple search features that provide limited support for the fundamental strategies...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore educational researchers’ online literature searching and sourcing strategies. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a multiple-case study approach, the authors conducted interviews and compared strategies employed by three groups of researchers:...

Charts the history and development of the UK’s Resource Discovery Network, which brings together under a common business, technical and service framework a range of subject gateways and other services for the academic and research community. Considers its future relationship to other services,...

This paper reports on an investigation comparing searcher experiences with Web and non‐Web interfaces to online databases. The study was designed to address the following questions: what is the nature of searcher preferences for Web versus non‐Web interfaces to online databases and, more...

The interrelation between Web publishing and information retrieval technologies is explored. The different elements of the Web have implications for indexing and searching Web pages. There are two main platforms used for searching the Web – directories and search engines – which later became...

Although the Internet is already a valuable information resource in medicine, there are important challenges to be faced before physicians and general users will have extensive access to this information. As a result of a research effort to compile a health‐related Internet directory, new...

This paper discusses the introduction of cookies into Web technology and their role as a user‐tracking device. While cookies contribute to the user‐friendliness of Web sites, their placement on client‐side computers is a cause for concern. The authors look at both sides of the technology,...

This article provides an overview of recent developments relating to the application of thesauri in information organisation and retrieval on the World Wide Web. It describes some recent thesaurus projects undertaken to facilitate resource description and discovery and access to wide‐ranging...