The paper presents the first phase of the findings of a doctoral research project. The primary author [PS] acknowledges the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council in providing funding for the part-time PhD studentship. The authors thank the…

Background:  Measures of the effectiveness of databases have traditionally focused on recall, precision, with some debate on how relevance can be assessed, and by whom. New measures of database performance are required when users are familiar with search engines, and…