Rivendell: Project-Based Academic Search Engine

Abstract

Finding relevant research literature in online databases is a familiar challenge to all researchers. General search approaches trying to tackle this challenge fall into two groups: one-time search and life-time search. We observe that both approaches ignore unique attributes of the research domain and are affected by concept drift. We posit that in searching for research papers, a combination of a life-time search engine with an explicitly-provided context (project) provides a solution to the concept drift problem. We developed and deployed a project-based meta-search engine for research papers called Rivendell. Using Rivendell, we conducted experiments with 199 subjects, comparing project-based search performance to one-time and life-time search engines, revealing an improvement of up to 12.8 percent in project-based search compared to life-time search.