Abstract :
The authors report the findings of a study that analyzes
and compares the query logs of PsycINFO for psychology
and the two history databases of ABC-Clio: Historical
Abstracts and America: History and Life to establish the
sociological nature of information need, searching, and
seeking in history versus psychology. Two problems are
addressed: (a) What level of query log analysis—by individual
query terms, by co-occurrence of word pairs, or
by multiword terms (MWTs)—best serves as data for
categorizing the queries to these two subject-bound
databases; and (b) how can the differences in the nature
of the queries to history versus psychology databases
aid in our understanding of user search behavior and the
information needs of their respective users. The authors
conclude that MWTs provide the most effective snapshot
of user searching behavior for query categorization.
The MWTs to ABC-Clio indicate specific instances of
historical events, people, and regions, whereas the
MWTs to PsycINFO indicate concepts roughly equivalent
to descriptors used by PsycINFO’s own classification
scheme. The average length of queries is 3.16 terms for
PsycINFO and 3.42 for ABC-Clio, which breaks from findings
for other reference and scholarly search engine
studies, bringing query length closer in line to findings
for general Web search engines like Excite.
