Originality: Online services are also exposed to users’ daily evaluation. Online information providers could be grouped into two categories: information vendors and scientific publishers. Possible differences between information vendors and scientific publishers are investigated, while their relevance is major consideration.
The Databases of major information were inspected for retrieving suitable pieces of information to the end-users. The study aimed at examining the vendors relevance versus the scientific publishers’ for possible difference between their retrieval systems.
Major scientific online information providers were examined. Since the authors were well experienced in Library and Information Sciences (LIS), evaluation examination was carried out in the LIS field. Using a similar-for-all search queries, the relevance, precision, recall, and false drop of online information providers were determined.
Among scientific publishers, Oxford Journals showed the best relevance while among information vendors, ISI Web of Knowledge (relevance=57.69) had the best performance.
Ignoring the information provider scope and size of database, all were almost reliable in retrieving online information. However, with exception of ISI Web of knowledge, this reliability has not exceeded from 50% relevance. Due to the mean of relevance, scientific publishers (m=30.61) had a lower performance versus information vendors (m=41.72). This difference should be considered by library managers for their renewing or cancellation programmes.
Information providers, Scientific publishers, relevance, false drop, information retrieval
