Analysis of Footnote Chasing and Citation Searching in an Academic Search Engine

TL;DR

This paper investigates how footnote chasing and citation search behaviors influence search effectiveness in an academic search engine, showing that these stratagems improve precision by around 16-17%.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of user behavior with specific search stratagems and their impact on search performance in an academic context.

Findings

Footnote chasing and citation search increase positive interactions by 16-17%.

These stratagems are frequently used in social sciences search sessions.

Their use correlates with improved search precision.

Abstract

In interactive information retrieval, researchers consider the user behavior towards systems and search tasks in order to adapt search results by analyzing their past interactions. In this paper, we analyze the user behavior towards Marcia Bates' search stratagems such as 'footnote chasing' and 'citation search' in an academic search engine. We performed a preliminary analysis of their frequency and stage of use in the social sciences search engine sowiport. In addition, we explored the impact of these stratagems on the whole search process performance. We can conclude that the appearance of these two search features in real retrieval sessions lead to an improvement of the precision in terms of positive interactions with 16% when using footnote chasing and 17% for the citation search stratagem.