SpringerLink's search engine cannot search on 'title, abstract, and keywords' scope

June 25, 2023. Ticket Number [#8019343]

To: customerservice@springernature.com

I noticed that SpringerLink search engine has only 2 extreme options regarding scope:

1. search for the entered terms only on the article title, or
2. search for the entered terms on the whole article text (including the references section),

while Scopus and ScienceDirect search engines do provide the option to search on the scope 'title, abstract, and keywords'-only.

While "title only" is evidently too limiting for well-written Search Strings using boolean operators to express relationships between keywords, and between keywords and its synonyms. I empirically confirmed that searching on "whole text" gives a MASSIVE amount of false positives.

In my research, which used the Search String quoted below, 90,81% of the articles returned by SpringerLink search engine had the keywords searched located:

1. only on the article text body, which indicates just a brief mention by the author(s), but not a profound study of the topic being researched by the reviewer; or even
2. only on the reference section, which is even worse, since this is equivalent to attesting that the possibly relevant article is another one and not the one returned by SpringerLink search engine results.

It is like a store informing its address on its website, and the customer walking to the place just to find the door closed with a sign of "moved to address Y". Why do that instead of giving a more precise information?

Search String used:

("drought forecast" OR "drought prediction") AND ("Machine Learning") AND ("drought index" OR "drought indices" OR "precipitation index" OR "precipitation indices") AND ("accuracy" OR "metric")

Again, just to make it clear... Total of articles that did not match these criteria on 'title, abstract or keywords', but insted on 'text body or reference sections': 90,81%. I don't think that a rate of 90,81% of false positives is reasonable for a search engine. Do you think it is?

Do Springer have plans to add support for searching on 'title, abstract, and keywords'-only?

June 25, 2023

From: customerservice@springernature.com

Thank you for contacting Springer Nature.

I have reviewed your query which needs the involvement of another department; I have therefore escalated it to the relevant team and they will follow-up with you as quickly as possible.

January 14, 2024

To: customerservice@springernature.com

I'm still waiting for an answer on this matter.

Do you already have one?

(no more replies since then)