Diversity and Accessibility in Academic Search Engine Results

Abstract

Search engines are the primary choice of information seekers to search information and academic search engines are highly used by academic and research communities like students, scholars, teachers and scientists. The present study aims to identify the diversity and accessibility in academic search engine results. The research started with identifying search tools on the World Wide Web, and only three scholarly search tools were selected after a preliminary study based on laid down criteria, i.e., Google Scholar, CORE, and BASE. Political science and economics were selected as the subjects of investigation, and their sub-fields were selected from the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme, from the class numbers 320-329 and 330-339, respectively. The search terms were derived from various subsets of fields (sub-fields) of the selected subjects. Later, these search terms were executed in the selected search tools to retrieve the results. Finally, the first thirty (30) hits were evaluated to check the diversity and accessibility of results. The accessibility of the results shows that CORE and BASE retrieve more open-access documents, whereas Google Scholar retrieves closed-access documents. The diversity of documents reveals that all the search engines retrieve most of the documents in English and mostly retrieve journal articles. The findings show that CORE and BASE retrieve most documents in Portable Document Format (PDF). In contrast, Google Scholar retrieves mostly web pages in html; however, its second choice is PDF. The results were similar across disciplines.

Keywords – Information Retrieval, Search Tools, Search Engines, Web Search Engines, Academic Search Engines, Google Scholar, BASE, CORE, Diversity, Accessibility