The effects on topic familiarity on online search behaviour and use of relevance criteria

Wen, L. and Ruthven, I. and Borlund, P.; Lalmas, M., ed. (2006) The effects on topic familiarity on online search behaviour and use of relevance criteria. In: Advances in Information Retrieval: Proceedings of the 28th European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2006). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3936 . Springer, pp. 456-459. ISBN 9783540333470 (https://doi.org/10.1007/11735106_40)

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Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study on the effect of topic familiarity on the assessment behaviour of online searchers. In particular we investigate the effect of topic familiarity on the resources and relevance criteria used by searchers. Our results indicate that searching on an unfamiliar topic leads to use of more generic and fewer specialised resources and that searchers employ different relevance criteria when searching on less familiar topics.