While geographic search filters exist, few of them are validated and there are currently none that focus on Germany. We aimed to develop and validate a highly sensitive geographic search filter for MEDLINE (PubMed) that identifies studies about Germany. First, using the relative recall method, we created a gold standard set of studies about…

When searching for scholarly documents, researchers often stick with the same familiar handful of databases. Yet, just beyond these limited horizons lie dozens of alternatives with which they could search more effectively, whether for quick lookups or thorough searches in systematic reviews or meta-analyses. Searchsmart.org is a free website that…

We read with considerable interest the study by Gusenbauer and Haddaway (Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020, Research Synthesis Methods, doi:10.1002/jrsm.1378) comparing the systematic search qualities of 28 search systems, including Google Scholar (GS) and PubMed. Google Scholar and PubMed are the two most popular free academic search tools in biology…

Rigorous evidence identification is essential for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (evidence syntheses) because the sample selection of relevant studies determines a review's outcome, validity, and explanatory power. Yet, the search systems allowing access to this evidence provide varying levels of precision, recall, and reproducibility and…

Primarily due to their convenience, online search engines such as Google and Bing are becoming a central location for obtaining information. As a result, societies give search engines tremendous control over the spread of information to the public. Through a high-school-level sample lesson plan, the article was written to promote dialogue with…

Publication of research, innovation, challenges and successes is of critical importance to the evolution of more effective distance education programming. Publication in peer reviewed journal format is the most prestigious and the most widespread form of dissemination in education and most other disciplines, thus the importance of understanding…

Context: The development of a consolidated knowledge base for social work requires rigorous approaches to identifying relevant research. Method: The quality of 10 databases and a web search engine were appraised by systematically searching for research articles on resilience and burnout in child protection social workers. Results: Applied Social…

Librarians regularly encounter students who struggle to understand and apply information literacy concepts. A qualitative survey administered to information literacy practitioners asked about troublesome content and analyzed results using the threshold concepts pedagogical framework first described by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept…

This research studies the development of a new prototype of visualization in support of movie retrieval. The goal of information visualization is unveiling of large amounts of data or abstract data set using visual presentation. With this knowledge the main goal is to develop a 2D presentation of information on movies from the IMDB (Internet Movie…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…

This article summarizes the author's dissertation regarding search strategies of millennial undergraduate students in Web and library online information retrieval systems. Millennials bring a unique set of search characteristics and strategies to their research since they have never known a world without the Web. Through the use of search engines,…

As the Web is becoming a powerful new medium in scientific publication and scholarly communication, citation indexing has found a new application in the digital environment. The authors reviewed the new developments in Web-based citation indexing and conducted a case study in three major citation search tools, "Web of Science", "Scopus" and…

Hardware and software filters, which sift through keywords placed in Internet search engines and online databases, work to limit the return of information from these sources. By their very purpose, filters exist to decrease the amount of information researchers can access. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the perceptions key…

Three hosted federated search tools, Follett One Search, Gale PowerSearch Plus, and WebFeat Express, were configured and implemented in a school library. Databases from five vendors and the OPAC were systematically searched. Federated search results were compared with each other and to the results of the same searches in the database's native…

An online questionnaire survey was distributed amongst the Petherick Readers of the National Library of Australia, a user group of scholars and researchers. The survey asked questions about the readers' use and appreciation of the NLA catalogue. This group of users clearly appreciated the library catalogue and demonstrated that there are still…