Browsing term lists (selection mode) helps searchers who do not know the exact query term¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · design r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 1994 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 2 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Continuous scrolling through alphabetical term lists is valuable because users do not always know the exact query term or author name. → Epstein 1994

Evidence¶

Epstein 1994¶

Epstein, Jonathan A., Kans, Jonathan A., & Schuler, Gregory D. (1994). WWW Entrez: A Hypertext Retrieval Tool for Molecular Biology. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED462262

q2 · i? · design · r2

The authors' ergonomic analysis of the Entrez interface reports, from experience, that "selection mode" scrolling of alphabetical term lists is valuable because "users don't always know the exact query term or author name". No effect size is reported.

"Experience shows that this scrolling ("selection mode") is a valuable feature of Entrez, since users don't always know the exact query term or author name."

Studies bearing on this claim¶

Do retrieval tools that help users who cannot state the exact query (term browsing, query expansion, result summaries) improve what they find? This table gathers the studies behind this claim and the 2 narrower claims that bear on it: 3 distinct studies (2 design, 1 causal), q2, 0 of 3 with an effect size coded. One row per study, codes as each entry records them; no effect is averaged and no verdict is drawn. Built by scripts/synthesize_claim.py from eval/synthesis/; a row that looks wrong is fixed on the claim it comes from.

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Internet-based Entrez use grew dramatically in 1994 while CD-ROM subscriptions plateaued — related
• Some users prefer a single-form Boolean query interface to the original Entrez interface — related
• Some users prefer to search by people groups, contexts and institutions rather than by subject categories, and some will not explore complex structures or long lists — related
• The effect of page-break response cues on locating accuracy depends on the presentation mode read: they help Page readers and hurt Scroll readers — related
• Readers locate sentences more accurately after reading a text in page-by-page presentation than in scrolling presentation — related
• Post-deployment diagnostics attributed many remaining retrieval misses to query formulation, with bounded expansion recovering eleven of 24 original queries without lowering the relevance floor — related