On Low Overlap Among Search Results of Academic Search Engines

摘要

Number of published scholarly articles is growing exponentially. To tacklethis information overload, researchers are increasingly depending on nicheacademic search engines. Recent works have shown that two major general websearch engines: Google and Bing, have high level of agreement in their topsearch results. In contrast, we show that various academic search engines havelow degree of agreement among themselves. We performed experiments using 2500queries over four academic search engines. We observe that overlap in searchresult sets of any pair of academic search engines is significantly low and inmost of the cases the search result sets are mutually exclusive. We alsodiscuss implications of this low overlap.