Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Randomized Controlled Trial
. 2010 Jun 30;12(2):e25.
doi: 10.2196/jmir.1396.

Clinician search behaviors may be influenced by search engine design

Annie Y S Lau  1 , Enrico Coiera, Tatjana Zrimec, Paul Compton
Affiliations
Randomized Controlled Trial

Clinician search behaviors may be influenced by search engine design

Annie Y S Lau et al. J Med Internet Res. .

Abstract

Background: Searching the Web for documents using information retrieval systems plays an important part in clinicians' practice of evidence-based medicine. While much research focuses on the design of methods to retrieve documents, there has been little examination of the way different search engine capabilities influence clinician search behaviors.

Objectives: Previous studies have shown that use of task-based search engines allows for faster searches with no loss of decision accuracy compared with resource-based engines. We hypothesized that changes in search behaviors may explain these differences.

Methods: In all, 75 clinicians (44 doctors and 31 clinical nurse consultants) were randomized to use either a resource-based or a task-based version of a clinical information retrieval system to answer questions about 8 clinical scenarios in a controlled setting in a university computer laboratory. Clinicians using the resource-based system could select 1 of 6 resources, such as PubMed; clinicians using the task-based system could select 1 of 6 clinical tasks, such as diagnosis. Clinicians in both systems could reformulate search queries. System logs unobtrusively capturing clinicians' interactions with the systems were coded and analyzed for clinicians' search actions and query reformulation strategies.

Results: The most frequent search action of clinicians using the resource-based system was to explore a new resource with the same query, that is, these clinicians exhibited a "breadth-first" search behaviour. Of 1398 search actions, clinicians using the resource-based system conducted 401 (28.7%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 26.37-31.11) in this way. In contrast, the majority of clinicians using the task-based system exhibited a "depth-first" search behavior in which they reformulated query keywords while keeping to the same task profiles. Of 585 search actions conducted by clinicians using the task-based system, 379 (64.8%, 95% CI 60.83-68.55) were conducted in this way.

Conclusions: This study provides evidence that different search engine designs are associated with different user search behaviors.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Quick Clinical (QC) was developed by researchers at the Centre for Health Informatics at the University of New South Wales, and the university and some of the authors could benefit from commercial exploitation of QC or its technologies.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Screenshot showing Quick Clinical, the task-based query user interface
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Hersh WR. Evidence-based medicine and the Internet. ACP J Club. 1996;125(1):A14–6. - PubMed
    1. Spink A, Cole C. New Directions in Cognitive Information Retrieval. 1st edition. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer; 2005.
    1. Hoogendam A, Stalenhoef AF, Robbe PF, Overbeke AJ. Analysis of queries sent to PubMed at the point of care: observation of search behaviour in a medical teaching hospital. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2008;8(1):42. doi: 10.1186/1472-6947-8-42. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Haase Andrea, Follmann Markus, Skipka Guido, Kirchner Hanna. Developing search strategies for clinical practice guidelines in SUMSearch and Google Scholar and assessing their retrieval performance. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2007;7(1):28. doi: 10.1186/1471-2288-7-28. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/7/281471-2288-7-28 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Lau AYS, Coiera EW. A Bayesian model that predicts the impact of Web searching on decision-making. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol. 2006;57(7):873–80. doi: 10.1002/asi.20377. - DOI

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources