Site Navigation and Its Impact on the Content Viewed by the Virtual Scholar: A Deep Log Analysis    

is paper presents early findings of a unique analysis that related questionnaire data to site usage as recorded in the transaction log reports of ScienceDirect, for the same people. Its focus is the differences in the online behaviour of three types of navigational users: those accessing the site via a gateway (either via a reference hyperlink or subject search facility), those using the on site search facility and those employing menus. Towards this end 16,865 sessions were analysed and grouped by navigational entry and compared over three types of online behaviour: the viewing of articles in press (AIP), the number of different journals viewed in a session and the viewing of old material. A strong association was found between form of navigation and behavioural trait. Those using menus were more likely to view AIPs, while those using the search facility were more likely to view a greater number of different journals and were more likely to view older material. This supports a hypothesis proposed by Nicholas et al. (2006) that use of the online searching facility increases the visibility of material irrespective of journal and age and results in a greater use of older material and a more diverse journal use compared to other online and off-line information retrieval methods. Although research has been undertaken on the different strategies that users employ to navigate and find their way around a collection of content (e.g. a digital library), this we believe is the first time the effect of different navigational strategies on outcomes (for example, what is viewed) has been investigated.

Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis

Employing Log Metrics to Evaluate Search Behaviour and Success: Case Study BBC Search Engine    

This paper argues that metrics can be generated from search transactional web logs that can help evaluate search engine effectiveness. Search logs from the BBC website were analysed and metrics extracted. Two search metrics — the time lapse between searches and the number of searches in a session — were developed to see whether they could measure search success or satisfaction. In all, 4 million search statements by 900,000 users were evaluated. The BBC search engine possessed a number of functional attributes which sought to improve retrieval and these were subjected to the two metrics to help determine how successful they were in practice. There was some evidence to support the proposition that the search outcome metrics did indeed indicate the effectiveness of engine functionality. The authors argue that this result is significant in that the identification of search outcome metrics will pave the way for assessing the effectiveness of site specific search engines and a greater understanding of the effectiveness of search engine functionality.

Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Case Studies>Log Analysis

Web Robot Detection in the Scholarly Information Environment    

An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots.

Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Research>Online