Cited references form an integral part of scholarly articles. They are included in the digital versions of course, but they do not necessarily provide any extra functionality. The most essential digital feature is to make the cited references hot‐linked. This article looks at the...

There are many options available to savvy searchers to help focus topical searches. These include limiting the search to one or more specific fields, such as title, descriptor or abstract in full‐text databases to eliminate items where the search term(s) occur only in the full‐text, often...

Citation searching has been available for decades, although in a limited form. This article discusses the advantages and limitations of searching by cited references, and also some alternatives in searching for cited references, before presenting a case study involving citation searching in...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to look into relevance ranking and its importance in trying to bring some order to the deluge of results in response to a query. Design/methodology/approach – A large‐scale analysis of detailed web logs of various search engines was performed....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of pertinence when using search databases. Design/methodology/approach – Several information systems are evaluated to show how user preferences are accommodated. Findings – The paper shows that the word “relevance” is the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss dubious hit counts in search results. Design/methodology/approach – Uses not only traditional databases and search engines but also unique citation databases to gain informative hit figures. Findings – Searches are finding materials that...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine clustering search results. Design/methodology/approach – Compares the clustering features of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar extensively. Findings – Producers who offer clustering, despite certain deficiencies, deserve...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the sizes of databases. Design/methodology/approach – The paper illustrates the various dimensions of some library and information science (LIS) databases and database subsets, and the implications of these differences. Findings –...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss databases with cited references. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers the dimensions of cited reference enhanced database subsets. Findings – The typical database has the ski slope shape, as there is a fairly steady, gradual...

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a general overview, to be followed by a series of papers focusing on the analysis of pros and cons of the three largest, cited‐reference‐enhanced, multidisciplinary databases (Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science) for determining the h‐index....