Workshop Paper: “Academic Search in Response to Major Scientific Events”

The following was presented at the 5th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR2017) held in Aberdeen, UK on April 9th, 2017.
Title
Academic Search in Response to Major Scientific Events
Authors
Xinyi Li
University of Amsterdam
Maarten de Rijke
University of Amsterdam
Source
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) co-located with the 39th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017)
Abstract

In this paper, we look at the search behavior of users of an academic search engine and in particular, their query patterns following the occurrence of major scientific events. We select Nobel Prize announcements as major scien- tific events and observe how academic searchers behave in response to their occurrences. We have found unique trends for the academic searchers, which are different from users of a web search engine. Moreover, academic searchers have similar query trends even for different topics, showing a commonality in their query behavior. The insights gained in this paper highlight the unique behavior of academic searchers and the differences from users of general web search engines. The findings may have implications for our understanding of the search behavior of academic searchers as well as for search engine design, for instance, concern- ing approaches to address information needs around major scientific events.

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