Does your profession involve the use of complex search strategies?
If so, we’d like to talk to you. UXLabs has recently begun an InnovateUK-funded project investigating the use of complex search strategies in the workplace, with the aim of producing requirements for the design of next generation search tools. As part of that we are doing some field research interviewing professionals from various sectors, such as:
- Recruitment
- Media monitoring and competitive intelligence
- Literature review (e.g. clinical/medical)
- Patent analysis and legal
Do you know of anyone from those sectors who could lend us a little of their time to discuss (and ideally demonstrate) the practical challenges that such professionals face in formulating complex search strategies? If so please get in touch with us at tgr AT uxlabs.co.uk. In return we’d be happy to share a pre-publication copy of any report we produce.
PS: Just in case you’re wondering, by ‘complex search strategies’ we mean either Boolean queries like this:
((((curtiss) NOT (curtis))) OR (((curtiss-* OR ~Curtiss-Wright* OR curtiss NEAR/1 wright*) AND ((model* OR monoplane*) NOT (prototype*)))))
Or fielded queries (e.g. combining keywords with controlled terms) like this:
("etiology"[Subheading] OR "etiology"[All Fields] OR "causes"[All Fields] OR "causality"[MeSH Terms] OR "causality"[All Fields]) AND ("somnambulism"[MeSH Terms] OR "somnambulism"[All Fields] OR ("sleep"[All Fields] AND "walking"[All Fields]) OR "sleep walking"[All Fields])
Or incremental, line-by-line strategies like this:
1 Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity/
2 adhd
3 addh
4 adhs
5 hyperactiv$
6 hyperkin$
7 attention deficit$
8 brain dysfunction
9 or/1-8
10 Child/
11 Adolescent/
12 child$ or boy$ or girl$ or schoolchild$ or adolescen$ or teen$ or “young person$” or “young people$” or youth$
13 or/10-12
14 acupuncture therapy/or acupuncture, ear/or electroacupuncture/
15 accupunct$
16 or/14-15
17 9 and 13 and 16
P.P.S. we’re grateful also for pointers to relevant work in this field, particularly those that build on or extend the following studies:
- Azzopardi, L., Vanderbauwhede, W., and Joho, H. (2010) Search system requirements of patent analysts. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 13-19 July 2010, Geneva, Switzerland. Association for Computing Machinery: New York, USA, pp. 775-776.
- Simon Bains, “End‐user searching at Cranfield University”, New Library World, Vol. 99 Iss: 1, pp.31 – 40, 1998.
- Manfred Geschwandtner, Marlene Kritz, and Celia Boyer. D8.1.2: Requirements of the health professional search. Technical report, Khresmoi Project, August 2011.
- Hideo Joho, Leif A. Azzopardi, and Wim Vanderbauwhede. 2010. A survey of patent users: an analysis of tasks, behavior, search functionality and system requirements. In Proceedings of the third symposium on Information interaction in context (IIiX ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13-24.
- Sarvnaz Karimi, Stefan Pohl, Falk Scholer, Lawrence Cavedon, Justin Zobel. Boolean versus ranked querying for biomedical systematic reviews. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2010, 10:58
- Stefan Raue, Leif Azzopardi, Christopher W. Johnson: #trapped!: social media search system requirements for emergency management professionals. SIGIR 2013: 1073-1076
- Evgenia Vassilakaki, Emmanouel Garoufallou, Frances Johnson, R. J. Hartley, Users’ Information Search Behavior in a Professional Search Environment: Professional Search in the Modern World Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 8830, 2014, pp 23-44.
- Kohn, A., Bry, F., Manta, A., Ifenthaler, D.: Professional search: Requirements, prototype and preliminary experience report. In: IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet, pp. 195–202 (2008).
- List, J.: The name of the game: Information seeking in a professional context. In: Lupu, M., Salampasis, M., Fuhr, N., Hanbury, A., Larsen, B., Strindberg, H. (eds.) Proceedings of the Integrating IR Technologies for Professional Search Workshop, Moscow, Russia (March 24, 2013).
Leave a comment