| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 圖書資訊學研究所 === 105 === Keyword search, also called quick search, is a common way used to retrieve relevant data in PubMed. Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) is another option in PubMed. Since users usually don’t provide any feedback to PubMed, it might be very difficult to know whether the performance of quick search or advanced search (MeSH) is good enough. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate the performance of both quick search and advanced search. In the past, researchers seem to rarely focus on the viewpoint of users. Also, topic familiarity plays an important role during the process of information retrieval. As a result, we would like to compare the PubMed quick search and advanced search with real users and real search requests as well as exploring the impact of familiarity.
A total of 32 participants in the bio-medical areas will be recruited, who, prior to the experiment, would be asked to prepared two search requests of their own, one familiar, the other, unfamiliar. A 2x2 Latin square factorial design was adopted where topic familiarity (high vs. low) and search interfaces (Quick vs. Advanced search) served as two within-subject factors. The background information is collected, following by the pre-search questionnaire, search task, post-search questionnaire, and post-experimental questionnaire to collect all the data of search performance and search behavior.
The result shows that there are no obvious differences between the performance of quick search and advanced search in terms of mean average precision, cumulative gain, discounted cumulative gain (DCG) and normalized DCG. There are no significant differences between participants’ satisfaction toward quick search and advanced search either. However, participants feel more frustrated when using advanced search. Quick search and advanced search have no significant impact on the similarity of initial and final query. Topic familiarity has no significant impact on goodness of initial and final query. However, topic familiarity was found to have a significant impact on users’ relevance judgment. Search results were found to be significantly more relevant, as judged by the users, for unfamiliar topics than familiar ones. Future research can be done to investigate how to assist users who are not familiar with their topics.
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