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...

Provides an introductory look at what savvy users should know about the implications of having information about cited references in I/A records. Looks at the more sophisticated, link‐enabled cited references and the novel citation scores in full‐text collections, then discusses the...

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 – To identify the qualities of various browsable indexes of cited references. Design/methodology/approach – Investigates existing browsable indexes and their implementation. Findings – Reveals the advantages and disadvantages of the systems investigated. Originality/value – This...

Purpose – To identify the pros and the cons of Google Scholar. Design/methodology/approach – Chronicles the recent history of the Google Scholar search engine from its inception in November 2004 and critiques it with regard to its merits and demerits. Findings – Feels that there are...

Purpose – Aims to discuss the various options for presenting the output of the search results of various online information systems. Design/methodology/approach – Investigates and evaluates various methods of presenting search results employed by certain online information systems. Findings...