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. 2015 Jul 2;3(3):e25.
doi: 10.2196/medinform.3740.

Analysis of PubMed User Sessions Using a Full-Day PubMed Query Log: A Comparison of Experienced and Nonexperienced PubMed Users

Illhoi Yoo  1 , Abu Saleh Mohammad Mosa
Affiliations

Analysis of PubMed User Sessions Using a Full-Day PubMed Query Log: A Comparison of Experienced and Nonexperienced PubMed Users

Illhoi Yoo et al. JMIR Med Inform. .

Abstract

Background: PubMed is the largest biomedical bibliographic information source on the Internet. PubMed has been considered one of the most important and reliable sources of up-to-date health care evidence. Previous studies examined the effects of domain expertise/knowledge on search performance using PubMed. However, very little is known about PubMed users' knowledge of information retrieval (IR) functions and their usage in query formulation.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to shed light on how experienced/nonexperienced PubMed users perform their search queries by analyzing a full-day query log. Our hypotheses were that (1) experienced PubMed users who use system functions quickly retrieve relevant documents and (2) nonexperienced PubMed users who do not use them have longer search sessions than experienced users.

Methods: To test these hypotheses, we analyzed PubMed query log data containing nearly 3 million queries. User sessions were divided into two categories: experienced and nonexperienced. We compared experienced and nonexperienced users per number of sessions, and experienced and nonexperienced user sessions per session length, with a focus on how fast they completed their sessions.

Results: To test our hypotheses, we measured how successful information retrieval was (at retrieving relevant documents), represented as the decrease rates of experienced and nonexperienced users from a session length of 1 to 2, 3, 4, and 5. The decrease rate (from a session length of 1 to 2) of the experienced users was significantly larger than that of the nonexperienced groups.

Conclusions: Experienced PubMed users retrieve relevant documents more quickly than nonexperienced PubMed users in terms of session length.

Keywords: MEDLINE; PubMed; PubMed query log; experienced users; information retrieval; nonexperienced users.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Data cleaning and preprocessing.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Query categorization.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Percentage of users and queries per number of queries.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Query types and session types.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Percentages of experienced and nonexperienced users per session length (# of queries per session).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Decrease rates of experienced and nonexperienced users by session length (# of queries per session).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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