In recent years, various disciplines have engaged in efforts to increase research reproducibility including the adoption of replicable search methodologies. With the development of reporting checklists and guidelines for systematic reviews such as the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Statement, authors…

A commonly reported challenge of using Google Search to identify studies for a systematic review is the high number of results retrieved. Thus, 'stopping rules' are applied when screening, such as screening only the first 100 results. However, recent evidence shows that Google Search estimates a much higher number of results than the viewable…

There are few sources that critically evaluate the ways of reviewing the literature on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). We use an academic literacies perspective as a lens with which to explore the ways that literature reviews may be undertaken. While reviewing the literature is often presented as a scientific, objective process, the…

This study offers an analysis and comparison of search results from Google concerning the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in two geographically and politically different contexts: the United States and Italy. As new AI systems, tools, and solutions are developed and implemented in each sector of human life on a global scale, certain…

There are few references that critically evaluate the different ways of searching the literature on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), or how these are related to researchers' goals. We use an academic literacies perspective as a lens with which to explore the different ways that literature searches may be undertaken. While searching the…

Background: Digital Information Literacy (DIL) refers to the ability to obtain, understand, evaluate, and use information in digital contexts. To accurately capture various dimensions of DIL, assessment designers have increasingly looked toward complex, interactive simulation-based environments that afford more authentic learner performances.…

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…

Microsoft Academic (MA) claims to be an academic search engine that uses knowledge discovery, machine learning, and semantic inference to help users search for scholarly information in new and better ways. However, this is not the first iteration of Microsoft Academic. Since its debut in 2004 as Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) (Ortega &…

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…

Purpose: College students need more support learning to effectively search for and evaluate online information. Without such skills, students are vulnerable to mis- and disinformation that may appear in their search results, Web browsing and social media feeds. This study investigated four short instructional modules four short instructional…

Introduction: Recently, the problem of diversification of search results has attracted a lot of attention in the information retrieval and Web search research community. For multi-faceted or ambiguous queries, a search engine is generally favoured if it is able to identify relevant documents on a wider range of different aspects. Method: We…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of smartphones among young people in everyday life, focusing on the activity of online search. This paper addresses the following research questions: What framings of the smartphone can be identified in the way that young people use, and describe, smartphones? What is the role of online…

The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experience of the Spanish-speaking Latino community during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. A single remote focus group meeting was conducted with nine Spanish-speaking participants to explore how residents living amidst shelter-in-place orders made informed decisions about health, safety,…

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…