The following is an excerpt from a new White Paper published by the IET on the growing importance of A&I databases. Librarians and researchers shared their thoughts on how they use search tools for academic research and highlighted the differences between curated resources and general search engines.


"In recent years the principles that drove the development on the World Wide Web – access to information across international boundaries – have been increasingly eroded by commercial and political concerns. Students have become increasingly dependent on global general search engines as gateways to information, but at the same time these gateways are becoming less and less helpful.


The challenges for professional researchers using the open web include the way cookies are used and the increased level of personalisation in search results, both of which can make search less replicable; the skill of filtering information; and identifying the provenance of material they find.


The theory is that a search engine treats all information fairly, and returns the most relevant results, but this is not always something that happens in practice. The use of cookies on a machine to make a judgement about the relevancy of a topic means that there is no level playing field when researchers begin their research. Their internet browser will already have decided what topic interests them based on the search history of the machine.


Librarians expressed some concern around a perceived lack of awareness among students and researchers of how far search results are personalised. This group is also felt to be much less aware of the difference using scholarly databases, including A&I services, can make to their research and that searches carried out on generic search engines are much harder to replicate. Scholarly databases make search much more visible.


Of course, general search engines devote enormous resources to developing their algorithms so that they return good results, but broad definitions that are useful to marketing at consumers don’t necessarily work for a highly specific, academic, search environment.


Once they have search results, students and researchers must make a judgement about whether or not they trust what they are reading. It is here that the skill of filtering information is crucial. This is particularly true for post graduate research students, for whom literature search is an essential aspect of their projects. Recent changes to the way online content is presented indicate that it may be become increasingly difficult for readers to assess the quality of the material they are accessing. Services such as Accelerated Mobile Pages from Google and Facebook Instant Articles are designed to increase the speed of delivery, but they do this by stripping articles of any article branding. This means that readers have no instant, visual way of establishing the provenance of what they are reading.


Metadata, including author, publisher and journal information is important to help researchers assess the relevance and quality of content. This is especially a problem because the search engines and social platforms that dominate the web are for-profit enterprises that accept advertising, and may well return a result because the article and end-user are a good fit for their advertising criteria. These non-neutral barriers are becoming an increasing problem."

You can download the full White Paper for free here