User Interests in German Social Science Literature Search - A Large Scale Log Analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes nine years of log data from a social science digital library to understand user interests, revealing diverse topical interests and a gap between system indexing language and user terminology.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale analysis of user interests in social science literature and visualizations to explore interests at various hierarchical and temporal levels.

Findings

Users show diverse interests across social science fields.

Topical interests are specific but vary widely among users.

A gap exists between indexing language and user terminology.

Abstract

The social sciences are a broad research field with a lot of sub- and related disciplines. Accordingly, user interests in a digital library for the social sciences are manifold. In this study we analyzed nine years log data of a social science digital library to get an overview of the fields, categories, topics and detailed information needs users are interested in. Based on the log data we have built interactive visualizations which give an overview and concurrently let us look at the detailed interests of users. The underlying log data and the created visualizations are then used to analyze user interests at different hierarchical levels and on a temporal view. The results show that there are topical interests of the users in specific fields and topics of the social sciences but at the same time there exists a diversity of different information needs. Based on these findings we analyze in detail the gap between the indexing language of the system used to annotate documents and the language users apply to articulate their information needs.