WHY IN THE WORLD? COMPARING “EXPERT” SEARCH RESULTS IN GEOREF ON MULTIPLE DATABASE PLATFORMS

Libraries, and consequently their users, have several options for access to GeoRef. Kimball (2010) analyzed the features of GeoRef on three platforms (EBSCO, Engineering Village and Ovid) and compared results of several simple searches, but did not test expert search techniques.

Several expert searches, designed to identify strengths and weaknesses of the various platforms’ search systems, were performed in GeoRef on four platforms: EBSCO, Engineering Village, Ovid and ProQuest. Controlled vocabulary searches were also performed. The results of the searches were compared to determine whether the items retrieved actually matched the search topic. The number of results that matched and did not match the topic were noted.

In addition to testing expert search techniques, searches using wildcards to replace characters that may or may not be present were also performed. The results were compared to determine how well the platforms performed on searching terms with variant spellings.

The number of results retrieved varied between platforms, with EBSCO retrieving the fewest results, and Engineering Village retrieving the most. One of the primary reasons for the discrepancy is that some platforms found geographic terms in the author and publisher address fields, even for proximity searches. Ovid and Engineering Village retrieved slightly more results when searching for variant forms of a term. These results need to be considered when choosing a database platform for GeoRef and other databases as well.

Kimball, R., 2010. The GeoRef Database: A Detailed Comparison and Analysis of Three Platforms. Science & Technology Libraries, vol. 29, no. 1/2, p. 111-129.