| This field experimental study compares the effectiveness of natural language search with Boolean search with broad queries in an academic environment. Sample queries were collected from undergraduate students with actual information needs at San Jose State University and searched in a heavily used database available at the university library; the numbers of retrieved citations, retrieved relevant citations, and retrieved unique relevant citations were analyzed. Natural language search retrieved a significantly larger number of total citations for both broad and narrow queries. For broad queries, no significant difference between natural language search and Boolean search was found in either the number of relevant citations or the number of unique relevant citations retrieved. However, for narrow queries, Boolean search was found to be far more successful in terms of the numbers of relevant and unique relevant citations retrieved. Implications of these findings for students, database designers, and librarians are discussed. |
