How do Computer Scientists Use Google Scholar?: A Survey of User Interest in Elements on SERPs and Author Profile Pages

In this paper, we explore user interest in elements on Google Scholar’s search engine result pages (SERPs) and author profile pages (APPs) through a survey in order to predict search behavior. We investigate the effects of different query intents (keyword and title) on SERPs and research area familiarities (familiar and less-familiar) on SERPs and APPs. Our findings show that user interest is affected by the respondents’ research area familiarity, whereas there is no effect due to the different query intents, and that users tend to distribute different levels of interest to elements on SERPs and APPs. We believe that this study provides the basis for understanding search behavior in using Google Scholar.

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