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Investigating exploratory search activities based on the stratagem level in digital libraries

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Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a user study on exploratory search activities in a social science digital library. We conducted a user study with 32 participants with a social sciences background—16 postdoctoral researchers and 16 students—who were asked to solve a task on searching related work to a given topic. The exploratory search task was performed in a 10-min time slot. The use of certain search activities is measured and compared to gaze data recorded with an eye tracking device. We use a novel tree graph representation to visualise the users’ search patterns and introduce a way to combine multiple search session trees. The tree graph representation is capable of creating one single tree for multiple users and identifying common search patterns. In addition, the information behaviour of students and postdoctoral researchers is being compared. The results show that search activities on the stratagem level are frequently utilised by both user groups. The most heavily used search activities were keyword search, followed by browsing through references and citations, and author searching. The eye tracking results showed an intense examination of documents metadata, especially on the level of citations and references. When comparing the group of students and postdoctoral researchers, we found significant differences regarding gaze data on the area of the journal name of the seed document. In general, we found a tendency of the postdoctoral researchers to examine the metadata records more intensively with regard to dwell time and the number of fixations. By creating combined session trees and deriving subtrees from those, we were able to identify common patterns like economic (explorative) and exhaustive (navigational) behaviour. Our results show that participants utilised multiple search strategies starting from the seed document, which means that they examined different paths to find related publications.

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Notes

  1. If a participant combined two search activities like for example keywords and queries we only report on the first search activity.

  2. https://github.com/wilkovanhoek/amur-session-tree/ijdl.

  3. Not all participants responded to each search activity which results in minor differences between the actual usage of a search activity (see Table 1) and the usefulness rating.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly funded by DFG, Grant No. MA 3964/5-1; the AMUR project at GESIS. We thank all participants of our user study, Dagmar Kern and the Sowiport [19] team at GESIS for supporting our study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667, Cologne, Germany

    Zeljko Carevic, Wilko van Hoek & Philipp Mayr

  2. RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Unter den Eichen 5, 65195, Wiesbaden, Germany

    Maria Lusky

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  1. Zeljko Carevic
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  3. Wilko van Hoek
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Correspondence to Zeljko Carevic or Philipp Mayr.

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Carevic, Z., Lusky, M., van Hoek, W. et al. Investigating exploratory search activities based on the stratagem level in digital libraries. Int J Digit Libr 19, 231–251 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-017-0226-6

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