An Exploratory Study into Perceived Task Complexity, Topic Specificity and Usefulness for Integrated Search

Peter Ingwersen; Christina Lioma; Birger Larsen; Peiling Wang

An Exploratory Study into Perceived Task Complexity, Topic Specificity and Usefulness for Integrated Search

Peter Ingwersen, Christina Lioma, Birger Larsen, Peiling Wang

Department of Communication

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original language	English
Publication date	21 Aug 2012
Number of pages	4
Publication status	Published - 21 Aug 2012

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IIiXposterfinal pw2 PISubmitted manuscript, 230 KB

http://IIiX2012.cs.ru.nl/proceedings.pdf

Cite this

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title = "An Exploratory Study into Perceived Task Complexity, Topic Specificity and Usefulness for Integrated Search",

abstract = "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.",

keywords = "Information Retrieval, Task-based IR, Task complexity, Search topic specificity, Book records, PDF",

author = "Peter Ingwersen and Christina Lioma and Birger Larsen and Peiling Wang",

note = "Proceedings of the 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium, Nijmegen, The Netherlands August 21-24, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-4503-1282-0; p. 302-306.",

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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.

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