Abstract. This paper presents an experimental study on the effect of topic familiarity on the assessment behaviour of online searchers. In particular we investigate the effect of topic familiarity on the resources and relevance criteria used by searchers. Our results indicate that searching on an unfamiliar topic leads to use of more generic and fewer specialised resources and that searchers employ different relevance criteria when searching on less familiar topics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.