New paper on arXiv.org, “Just Google It – Digital Research Practices of Humanities Scholars”

“three hundred (N= 288) humanities scholars in the Netherlands and Belgium … General search systems such as Google and JSTOR are predominant, while large-scale collections such as Europeana [a repository of digitised versions of “Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage”] are rarely consulted. Searching with keywords is the dominant search strategy and advanced search options are rarely used. When comparing novice and more experienced searchers, the first tend to have a more narrow selection of search engines, and mostly use keywords.”