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Personalization is not a panacea: balancing serendipity and personalization in medical news content delivery

Published: 28 January 2012 Publication History
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    Personalization is viewed as a potential solution to the "information overload" problem. In contrast, serendipity is a natural part of human information seeking process that can lead to unexpected and useful discoveries. It appears both serendipity and personalization are important. However, it remains unclear how these modes of interaction impact content retrieval and consumption. To empirically analyze the influence of personalization and serendipity on information retrieval, a medical news information system named MedSIFTER was developed. The system can personalize the presentation of news articles based on users' interest profiles. Using a control variable, built into the system, MeSIFTER's personalization level can be modulated, ranging from high to low (or zero). In this study, based on MedlinePlus as main information source, three different system modalities were compared (zero, low, and high levels of personalization). The experimental analysis engaged three different user groups, over a four week period. Strong evidence of serendipity was found across all three user groups, independent of the level of personalization. Users also appeared to be uniformly satisfied regardless of the level of personalization.

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    1. Personalization is not a panacea: balancing serendipity and personalization in medical news content delivery

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          IHI '12: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGHIT International Health Informatics Symposium
          January 2012
          914 pages
          ISBN:9781450307819
          DOI:10.1145/2110363
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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          Publication History

          Published: 28 January 2012

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          Author Tags

          1. cognitive profile
          2. personalization
          3. serendipity
          4. usability analysis

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          IHI '12
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          IHI '12: ACM International Health Informatics Symposium
          January 28 - 30, 2012
          Florida, Miami, USA

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          • (2018)Detecting the association of health problems in consumer-level medical textJournal of Information Science10.1177/016555151667162944:1(3-14)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2018
          • (2018)Visualizing Serendipitous Recommendations in User Controlled Recommender System for LearningProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.136141(496-502)Online publication date: 2018
          • (2017)Researching Serendipity in Digital Information EnvironmentsSynthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services10.2200/S00790ED1V01Y201707ICR0599:6(i-91)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2017
          • (2017)Accuracy Is Not Enough: Serendipity Should Be Considered MoreInnovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing10.1007/978-3-319-61542-4_22(231-241)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2017
          • (2012)Fuzzy Multicriteria Decision Analysis for Measurement of Document Content ReliabilityProceedings of the 2012 Fifth International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Design - Volume 0210.1109/ISCID.2012.227(303-306)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2012

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