An exploratory study into perceived task complexity, topic specificity and usefulness for integrated search

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.