First I asked about a very specific niche thing. I gave me results but none I wanted. It looked like I missed a crucial piece of information.
So I did the second search. I started with the final request it written for the previous search and added the information I though I missed. It gave me virtually the same results with a little sprinkle of what I was actually after.
A few observations:
1. I'm not sure but it seems like it relies too much on citation count. Or maybe citations in papers make it think that the paper is absolutely a must read. I specifically said I'm not interested in what's in that paper and I still got those results.
2. I don't see much dissertations/theses in the result. I know for sure that there a good results for my request in a few dissertations. None of them are in the results.
That said, while I didn't get exactly what I want I've found a few interesting papers even if they're tangential to the actual request.
A few possibilities:
- We only use abstracts for now. Have to make sure you ask for something present there.
- Did you ask for a scientific topic? (Sometimes people ask for papers by a specific author, journal, etc. The system isn't engineered to efficiently find that).
Regarding citations: we use them, but only for figuring out which papers to look at next in the iterative discovery process, not for choosing what to rank higher or lower at the end (unless you explicitly ask for citations). It's ranking based on topic match.
If you're comfortable, posting the report URLs here can let us debug.
I did 2 searches.
First I asked about a very specific niche thing. I gave me results but none I wanted. It looked like I missed a crucial piece of information.
So I did the second search. I started with the final request it written for the previous search and added the information I though I missed. It gave me virtually the same results with a little sprinkle of what I was actually after.
A few observations:
1. I'm not sure but it seems like it relies too much on citation count. Or maybe citations in papers make it think that the paper is absolutely a must read. I specifically said I'm not interested in what's in that paper and I still got those results.
2. I don't see much dissertations/theses in the result. I know for sure that there a good results for my request in a few dissertations. None of them are in the results.
That said, while I didn't get exactly what I want I've found a few interesting papers even if they're tangential to the actual request.