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Information seeking is an interactive behaviour of the end users with information systems, which occurs in a real environment known as context. Context affects information-seeking behaviour in many different ways. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that potentially constitute the context of visual information seeking.

The authors used a Straussian version of grounded theory, a qualitative approach, to conduct the study. Using a purposive sampling method, 28 subjects participated in the study. The data were analysed using open, axial and selective coding in MAXQDA software.

The contextual factors influencing visual information seeking were classified into seven categories, including: “user characteristics”, “general search features”, “visual search features”, “display of results”, “accessibility of results”, “task type” and “environmental factors”.

This study contributes to a better understanding of how people conduct searches in and interact with visual search interfaces. Results have important implications for the designers of information retrieval systems.

This paper is among the pioneer studies investigating contextual factors influencing information seeking in visual information retrieval systems.

The purpose of this paper is to list the resources that Iranian health-care professionals used to access drug-related information, to know the features and types of drug information resources which were much more important for health-care professionals, the problems they encountered in seeking drug information and the way they organized and re-found the information that they had retrieved. Drug-related queries are one of the most common types of questions in medical settings.

This was a descriptive-analytical study conducted in Iran during 2014. The data collection tool was a self-designed questionnaire. Data analysis was conducted using Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Descriptive statistics and chi-square test were used to analyse the data and examine the research hypothesis.

Participants used books, drug manuals, search engines and medical databases more frequently, and less than half of them consulted colleagues to acquire drug-related information for clinical, educational and research purposes. Handheld computers were used by most participants to access and store drug information. Lack of access to drug information and lack of enough time were the main obstacles in seeking drug information. A significant association (p value = 0.024) was detected between organizing and re-finding information for future uses.

This study investigated drug information-seeking behaviours of health-care professionals and the way they managed this information in a developing country that lacks necessary information technology infrastructures. Training programmes are required to help health-care professionals to find and access reliable and up-to-date drug information resources and to more easily re-find the found drug information for future uses.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review on the use of the recall metric for evaluating information retrieval systems, especially search engines.

This paper investigates different researchers’ views about recall metrics.

Five different definitions for recall were identified. For the first group, recall refers to completeness, but it does not specify where all the relevant documents are located. For the second group, recall refers to retrieving all the relevant documents from the collection. However, it seems that the term “collection” is ambiguous. For the third group (first approach), collection means the index of search engines and, for the fourth group (second approach), collection refers to the Web. For the fifth group (third approach), ranking of the retrieved documents should also be accounted for in calculating recall.

It can be said that in the first, second and third approaches, the components of the retrieval algorithm, the retrieval algorithm and crawler, and the retrieval algorithm and crawler and ranker, respectively, are evaluated. To determine the effectiveness of search engines for the use of users, it is better to use the third approach in recall measurement.

The value of this paper is to collect, identify and analyse literature that is used in recall. In addition, different views of researchers about recall are identified.