Search results

While the primary importance of citation searching continues to be connecting researchers to highly-related literature, additional uses for the data have developed. For example, academic institutions frequently recommend that faculty include a citation analysis in their tenure and promotion (t & p) dossiers as a way of demonstrating the value of their research. Due to the limited number of tools available for this type of analysis in the past, Librarians were unable to help faculty create an exhaustive accounting of citations to their work. The aim of this paper is to provide examples of the growing number of tools that now exist to assist librarians and faculty in locating citation information for t & p dossiers.

An in-depth survey of both free and subscription resources to identify those that offered options for citation searching was conducted.

Commercial vendors, organizations and researchers are developing a wide variety of tools that help track the impact of a faculty member's research.

The list of resources surveyed is not comprehensive. The research was focused on those available, and most relevant to the author's institution.

Based on the results of this investigation, a web page was created to help direct faculty and librarians to a large number of resources for citation searching (available at: http://libresources.wichita.edu/citationsearching).

Librarians have prepared numerous web guides to assist faculty in conducting citation searches. Few offer links to as wide a variety of resources as this research presents.

Citation searching has been available for decades, although in a limited form. This article discusses the advantages and limitations of searching by cited references, and also some alternatives in searching for cited references, before presenting a case study involving citation searching in full‐text indexes.

The purpose of this paper is to implement and enhance the citation linker that enables users to search articles, journals, and books with minimal but sufficient citation metadata.

The research work was mainly based on experimental results with a large amount of specific articles, journals, books, and eBooks. Further Ex Libris was consulted during the implementation process.

The paper found ways to implement and enhance the citation linker that facilitates citation search with minimal but sufficient citation metadata. Different methods to search papers and books were identified and possible future endeavors to enhance the citation linker by Ex Libris were also suggested.

The paper elaborates how to implement and enhance the citation linker that facilitates citation search with minimal but sufficient citation metadata. The author did not find any research work specifically focused on configurations of the citation linker and their effects on search results for users, so the implementation experience presented in this paper should be singularly instructive for libraries implementing their citation linkers.

The purpose of this paper is to understand why users at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) are unable to locate locally held items from the university libraries' electronic and physical collections using the library web site and catalog.

A combination of usability testing methods and quality control methods were used. Items for the study were selected from cancelled interlibrary loan requests. A cognitive walkthrough was performed for citations representative of the top categories of cancellation because the item is owned or available electronically. Quality control methods were used to determine likely user failure points to completing this path. Data from the cognitive walkthrough were compared with actual user behavior, as observed through usability testing.

Participants in the study failed to locate known items for multiple reasons, but from the usability testing and analysis three major areas emerged: finding the correct starting‐point for the search, information not indexed for a selected search, and clicking on the call number link. The complexity of library resources was the main contributor to these failures. Participants expected library searching to behave like their other search experiences.

The failure points identified in the study are in some cases specific to features of the UNLV Libraries' integrated library system.

This paper could be useful to libraries examining the ease with which users can locate items using the library web site and catalog. The research team used a quality control method to analyze usability testing, which provides valuable quantitative data concerning the relationship between user and system failure.

A behavioural approach to information retrieval system design is outlined based on the derivation of a behavioural model of the information seeking patterns of academic social scientists. The information seeking patterns of a variety of academic social scientists were broken down into six characteristics: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, and extracting. These characteristics constitute the principal generic features of the different individual patterns, and together provide a flexible behavioural model for information retrieval system design. The extent to which these characteristics are available on existing systems is considered, and the requirements for implementing the features on an experimental system are set out.

The online search activities described here were conducted to provide environmental scientists with literature to use in their review of pesticide chemicals for regulatory decisions. The first criterion for this data gathering process was to have complete coverage to approach 100% recall of the papers published on the pesticide in question. As new databases were developed and current ones were updated, the number of searchable files multiplied. Running large profiles against each data‐base now resulted in, increased online costs, (connect‐time/print charges), greater overlap and duplication and, inundating the reviewer with thousands of citations. Thus it became apparent that the effectiveness of searching this multitude of applicable databases must be evaluated. Where is the overlap? Which data‐bases contain unique citations? How can the number of databases be decreased without minimizing the percentage of coverage?

The purpose of this paper is to clarify some issues regarding citation indexing, analysis and searching.

The paper begins with a discussion on an article in the D‐Lib Magazine and then focuses on deflated citation counts and inflated and phantom citation counts.

The combination of the inflated citation count values dispensed by Google Scholar (GS) with the ignorance and shallowness of some GS enthusiasts can be a real mix for real scholars.

The paper offers insight into deflated, inflated and phantom citation counts.

To date, librarians have not produced a study comparing databases that are appropriate for political science research. This study compares the coverage, content, and retrieval methods for nine databases. The study uses sampling to evaluate search results for six topics, providing relevancy percentages for each database. The article also reviews the types of documents cited in these samples, and provides recommendations for matching each database to particular research needs.

With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively.

The wide adoption of web-scale discovery tools calls into question the usefulness and viability of traditional subject indexes. This study examines this question of usefulness in the context of the discipline of literary studies. To what extent can researchers rely on the primary database devoted to language and literature study to discover relevant scholarship, and how does the database's performance compare to other common search tools?

The study uses a random sample of citations from articles published in the flagship journal, PMLA, to see how well the sources cited by literature scholars are covered in various search tools, including the MLA International Bibliography.

Of the search tools investigated, Google Scholar found the largest number of citations, even when limiting to literary scholarship. However, the eclecticism of citations suggests that scholars benefit from using a variety of search tools and methods.

Although other studies have looked at discoverability in certain subject areas, this one focuses on literary studies. An understanding of the relative coverage of different search tools can inform librarian practices and recommendations.