Sorting Search Results of Literature Digital Libraries: Recent Developments and Future Research Directions
Sulieman Bani‐Ahmad · InTech eBooks · 2011
An OLDL (Online Literature Digital Library) is a library in which collections, i.e., publications from one or more domains of study, are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media) and accessible by users through the Internet.Examples of wellknown OLDLs are IEEE Xplore (IEEE Xplore, 2008), ACM Portal (ACM Digital Library, 2008), CiteSeer (CiteSeer, 2008), Google Scholar (Google Scholar, 2008), and PubMed (PubMed, 2008).Digital libraries are rapidly growing in popularity.For instance, ScienceDirect (ScienceDirect, 2008), the world's leading scientific, technical and medical information resource celebrated its billionth article download in November'06 since launched in 1999.Besides usage, digital libraries are also rapidly growing in terms of size and diversity of topics.For instance, (i) in Computer Science, ACM Digital Library (ACM Digital Library, 2008) has close to one million full-text publications collected over 50 years, to search and download; (ii) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, IEEE Xplore (IEEE Xplore, 2008), another OLDL, provides users with on-line access to more than 1,700 selected conferences proceedings.These high growth rates introduced several challenges facing the information access capability of OLDLs.Next we list few challenges that probably guides future research related to LDLs.Challenge 1: Large Sizes and Topic Diversity of Search Output Results.Search outputs of OLDLs tend to suffer from the "topic diffusion" problem, where commonly, keyword-based searches produce a large number of publications over a large number of topics, where not all topics are of interest to the user.One way to solve this problem is to assign scores to search results ( i.e., publications).Assigning scores to publications helps OLDLs to present the most important relevant publications to the user first, Citation-based publication score measures (e.g., citation count) are commonly used for ranking publications.At the present time, OLDLs lack effective and accurate publication ranking.Challenge 2: Lack of Effective Scoring Functions for Publications.At the present time, OLDLs lack effective and accurate publication rankings (Ratprasartporn et al., 2007).Providing accurate publication scores can help users in reducing the time spent in searching OLDLs, and thus enhances the scalability of OLDL usage as users can quickly identify important relevant publications to their topic of interest.www.intechopen.com