Sowiport User Search Sessions Data Set (SUSS)

This data set contains individual search sessions from the transaction log of the academic search engine sowiport (www.sowiport.de). The data was collected over a period of one year (between 2nd April 2014 and 2nd April 2015). The web server log files and specific javascript-based logging techniques were used to capture the usage behaviour within the system. All activities are mapped to a list of 58 actions. This list covers all types of activities and pages that can be carried out/visited within the system (e.g. typing a query, visiting a document, selecting a facet, etc.). For each action, a session id, the date stamp and additional information (e.g. queries, document ids, and result lists) are stored. The session id is assigned via browser cookie and allows tracking user behaviour over multiple searches. Based on the session id and date stamp, the step in which an action is conducted and the length of the action is included in the data set as well. The data set contains 558,008 individual search sessions and a total of 7,982,427 logs entries. The average number of actions per search session is 7.
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This work was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant no. MA 3964/5-1; the AMUR project at GESIS.