An exploratory study into perceived task complexity, topic specificity, and usefulness for integrated search

TY - GEN

T1 - An exploratory study into perceived task complexity, topic specificity, and usefulness for integrated search

AU - Ingwersen, Peter

AU - Lioma, Christina

AU - Larsen, Birger

AU - Wang, Peiling

N1 - Conference code: 4

PY - 2012

Y1 - 2012

N2 - We investigate the relations between user perceptions of work task complexity, topic specificity, and usefulness of retrieved results. 23 academic researchers submitted detailed descriptions of 65 real-life work tasks in the physics domain, and assessed documents retrieved from an integrated collection consisting of full text research articles in PDF, abstracts, and bibliographic records [6]. Bibliographic records were found to be more precise than full text PDFs, regardless of task complexity and topic specificity. PDFs were found to be more useful. Overall, for higher task complexity and topic specificity bibliographic records demonstrated much higher precision than did PDFs on a four-graded usefulness scale.

AB - We investigate the relations between user perceptions of work task complexity, topic specificity, and usefulness of retrieved results. 23 academic researchers submitted detailed descriptions of 65 real-life work tasks in the physics domain, and assessed documents retrieved from an integrated collection consisting of full text research articles in PDF, abstracts, and bibliographic records [6]. Bibliographic records were found to be more precise than full text PDFs, regardless of task complexity and topic specificity. PDFs were found to be more useful. Overall, for higher task complexity and topic specificity bibliographic records demonstrated much higher precision than did PDFs on a four-graded usefulness scale.

U2 - 10.1145/2362724.2362780

DO - 10.1145/2362724.2362780

M3 - Article in proceedings

SP - 302

EP - 305

BT - Proceedings of the 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

T2 - 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium

Y2 - 21 August 2012 through 24 August 2012

ER -