Novice and experienced users’ search performance and satisfaction with Web of Science and Scopus

Abstract

This paper aims to determine novice and experienced users’ search performance and satisfaction with the interfaces of the Web of Science and Scopus. This is a descriptive-analytical study. Snowball sampling was used. Given queries were searched by 15 experienced and 15 novice users and their search performance was recorded using Camtasia. Their satisfaction was determined by the QUIS questionnaire. The experienced users were more satisfied with both databases than the novices but the difference was not significant. The results imply that even a limited amount of search experience provides search performance benefits in using databases to locate information. If a user interface is designed in a proper manner and considering users’ needs, users get better results.