On Low Overlap Among Search Results of Academic Search Engines

Abstract: Number of published scholarly articles is growing exponentially. To tackle this information overload, researchers are increasingly depending on niche academic search engines. Recent works have shown that two major general web search engines: Google and Bing, have high level of agreement in their top search results. In contrast, we show that various academic search engines have low degree of agreement among themselves. We performed experiments using 2500 queries over four academic search engines. We observe that overlap in search result sets of any pair of academic search engines is significantly low and in most of the cases the search result sets are mutually exclusive. We also discuss implications of this low overlap.