Abstract
The enormous growth in the size of scholarly literature makes its retrieval challenging. To address this challenge, researchers and practitioners developed several solutions. These include indexing solutions e.g. ResearchGate, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP) etc., research paper repositories e.g. arXiv.org, Zenodo, etc., digital libraries, scholarly retrieval systems, e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Semantic Scholar etc., digital libraries, and publisher websites. Among these, the scholarly retrieval systems, the main focus of this article, employ efficient information retrieval techniques and other search tactics. However, they are still limited in meeting the user information needs to the fullest. This brief review paper is an attempt to identify the main reasons behind this failure by reporting the current state of scholarly retrieval systems. The findings of this study suggest that the existing scholarly retrieval systems should differentiate scholarly users from ordinary users and identify their needs. Citation network analysis should be made an essential part of the retrieval system to improve the search precision and accuracy. The paper also identifies several research challenges and opportunities that may lead to better scholarly retrieval systems.
Highlights
A scholarly retrieval system is a sophisticated software that performs crawling, indexing, searching, and ranking to make scholarly data, available to searchers
Several scholarly retrieval systems including Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, CiteSeerX and Chinese Baidu Academic [1] are frequently used by modern-day online searchers
This paper aims to report on the current state of the scholarly retrieval system by identifying the commonalities and differences between web and scholarly users, surveying the search techniques of the available scholarly retrieval systems, and understanding the potential role citation networks analysis in retrieval relevant research publications
Summary
A scholarly retrieval system is a sophisticated software that performs crawling, indexing, searching, and ranking to make scholarly data (research publications and related information including authors, publishers, citations, etc.), available to searchers. The retrieved scholarly documents include journal articles, conference proceedings, books, dissertations, technical reports, and patents. While some of these documents are freely accessible to all members of the public, access to others is Corresponding author: Shah Khusro www.etasr.com limited only to subscribers. The number of scholarly documents increases at an annual rate of over 1 million [5] Such a huge collection of research publications is challenging to process and find relevant papers effortlessly. Researchers are working on finding out a way for supporting scholarly search and making it more accessible Their efforts resulted in several indexing solutions, publication repositories, digital libraries, research paper recommender systems, and scholarly retrieval systems. This paper aims to report on the current state of the scholarly retrieval system by identifying the commonalities and differences between web and scholarly users, surveying the search techniques of the available scholarly retrieval systems, and understanding the potential role citation networks analysis in retrieval relevant research publications
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