Legal researchers, recruitment professionals, healthcare information professionals, and patent analysts all undertake work tasks where search forms a core part of their duties. In these instances, the search task is often complex and time-consuming and requires specialist expertise to identify relevant documents and insights within large 15 domain-specific repositories and collections. Several studies have been made investigating the search practices of professionals such as these, but few have attempted to directly compare their professional practices and so it remains unclear to what extent insights and approaches from one domain can be applied to another. In this paper we describe the results of a survey of a purposive sample of 108 legal 20 researchers, 64 recruitment professionals and 107 healthcare information professionals. Their responses are compared with results from a previous survey of 81 patent analysts. The survey investigated their search practices and preferences, the types of functionality they value, and their requirements for future information retrieval systems. The results reveal that these professions share many fundamental 25 needs and face similar challenges. In particular a continuing preference to formulate queries as Boolean expressions, the need to manage, organise and re-use search strategies and results and an ambivalence toward the use of relevance ranking. The results stress the importance of recall and coverage for the healthcare and patent professionals, while precision and recency were more important to the legal and 30 recruitment professionals. The results also highlight the need to ensure that search systems give confidence to the professional searcher and so trust, explainability and accountability remains a significant challenge when developing such systems. The * Email address: tgr@uxlabs.co.uk findings suggest that translational research between the different areas could benefit professionals across domains. 35

BackgroundHealthcare information professionals play a key role in closing the knowledge gap between medical research and clinical practice. Their work involves meticulous searching of literature databases using complex search strategies that can consist of hundreds of keywords, operators, and ontology terms. This process is prone to error and can lead to inefficiency and bias if performed incorrectly.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate the search behavior of healthcare information professionals, uncovering their needs, goals, and requirements for information retrieval systems.MethodsA survey was distributed to healthcare information professionals via professional association email discussion lists. It investigated the search tasks they undertake, their techniques for search strategy formulation, their approaches to evaluating search results, and their preferred functionality for searching library-style databases. The popular literature search system PubMed was then evaluated to determine the extent to which their needs were met.ResultsThe 107 respondents indicated that their information retrieval process relied on the use of complex, repeatable, and transparent search strategies. On average it took 60 minutes to formulate a search strategy, with a search task taking 4 hours and consisting of 15 strategy lines. Respondents reviewed a median of 175 results per search task, far more than they would ideally like (100). The most desired features of a search system were merging search queries and combining search results.ConclusionsHealthcare information professionals routinely address some of the most challenging information retrieval problems of any profession. However, their needs are not fully supported by current literature search systems and there is demand for improved functionality, in particular regarding the development and management of search strategies.

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In this report we describe the outcome of the First International Workshop on Professional Search, held in co-location with SIGIR 2018. The workshop addressed the specific requirements and challenges of professional search, as opposed to web search. The workshop included a survey held among 113 professional searchers, two keynote talks, six short paper talks, and two break-out sessions. From all parts of the workshop, we concluded that (1) we can define professional search with a set of common characteristics; but (2) there are definitely differences between domains; (3) we are in need of more knowledge about the search process in different domains, and (4) we need to collect data, not only Cranfieldstyle test collections, but also user observation data that help us understand the challenges and requirements of professional search better. Currently, there are many open problems that potentially have an impact on the IR community beyond the professional domains. We therefore call the scientific IR community to address professional search more actively.

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