Purpose – This purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the problems that exist with Google Scholar, particularly regarding content spam and citation spam. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an analysis of how Google Scholar has been duped by real but manipulated documents...

Purpose – Many traditional commercial publishers realise that they need to rejuvenate at least the interface part of their software in order to keep up with the trends in online information retrieval, and information dissemination that cannot be sufficiently limited by the software equivalent...

Purpose – Google Scholar has been increasingly used in the past six to seven years as a highly efficient information source and service by librarians and other information professionals. The problem is when Google Scholar is touted and used as a bibliometric/scientometric tool and resource in...

Many professional searchers and end‐users do not use the controlled vocabulary terms when formulating their queries, despite there being software solutions in various online information retrieval services to guide users to the most appropriate terms. Two search software packages...

Traditional online information services have been offering proximity and positional operators for many years to narrow or broaden a search by specifying how far and in what order the words of the query should appear in the documents or in their surrogates to qualify for retrieval. The proximity...

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...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the growing importance of information available when searching for cited papers Design/methodology/approach – Looks at the different formats available when searching for cited papers and how these formats can be manipulated to provide more...

Purpose – To compare the performance of different search engines, highlighting the overlap and rank differences. Design/methodology/approach – Presents results of an overlap test search series among traditional CD‐ROM indexing/abstracting databases since the mid‐1980s, web databases, and...

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...