This paper reports the results of a study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board which sought to investigate links between Web search strategies and retrieval effectiveness. A total of 68 students, enrolled on masters programmes in librarianship, information management and information...

“Serendipity” has both a classical origin in literature and a more modern manifestation where it is found in the descriptions of the problem solving and knowledge acquisition of humanities and science scholars. Studies of information retrieval and information seeking have also discussed the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report an empirical investigation into conceptions of the “invisible web”. Design/methodology/approach – This was an exploratory qualitative study based on in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with 15 members of academic staff from three...

Purpose – This paper reports the findings of a study designed to explore web searchers' perceptions of the causes of their search failure and success. In particular, it seeks to discover the extent to which the constructs locus of control and attribution theory might provide useful frameworks...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine our current knowledge of how searchers perceive and react to the possibility of missing potentially important information whilst searching the web is limited. The study reported here seeks to investigate such perceptions and reactions, and to explore the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe: a new taxonomy of metacognitive skills designed to support the study of metacognition in the context of web searching; a data collection instrument based on the taxonomy; and the results of testing the instrument on a sample of university...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of a number of human individual differences on the web searching of a sample of the general public. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 91 members of the general public performed 195 controlled searches. Search activity and...

Research into information retrieval (IR) cannot yet answer the basic question of how we can design IR systems to help people search for information with optimal levels of effectiveness. In relation to human‐system interaction, we have failed to develop any valid and at the same time robust...

This is a speculative paper in which the requirements of IR systems to support relatively creative, as well as more convergent thinking are discussed. The nature of creative thinking is explored, as is the extent to which a range of current information systems is able to support key intellectual...