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However, few studies have been done to examine how task complexity could be measured from users' perspective in information science. The present study identifies a set of objective and subjective measures and conducted a survey. The survey asked users to judge the complexity of a task, and then give the reasons why they made that judgment based on the measures. Six simulated task situations were developed for the survey and 168 valid questionnaires (84% return rate) were analyzed. The results indicate that the number of words hard to understand, the number of languages required for search results, and the number of domain areas involved in a task could significantly predict task complexity. The study helps further understand the attributes of task complexity and has implications in research on interactive information retrieval (IIR), task\u2010based information seeking and search, and personalization of information retrieval (IR).<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1002\/meet.2011.14504801092","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]],"date-time":"2012-01-11T12:23:03Z","timestamp":1326284583000},"page":"1-8","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Measuring task complexity in information search from user's perspective"],"prefix":"10.1002","volume":"48","author":[{"given":"Yuelin","family":"Li","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Yu","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Jinghong","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Yuan","family":"Cheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Xuan","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Ping","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Qianqian","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"311","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_7_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bell D. &Ruthven I.(2004).Searcher's assessments of task complexity for web searching. In S. McDonald & J. Tait (Eds.) European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2004).Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 2997 57\u201371.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-540-24752-4_5"},{"key":"e_1_2_7_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1002\/asi.10064"},{"key":"e_1_2_7_4_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/0306-4573(95)80035-R"},{"key":"e_1_2_7_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.2307\/258353"},{"key":"e_1_2_7_6_1","first-page":"1","article-title":"Task complexity and informing science: A synthesis","volume":"9","author":"Gill T. G.","year":"2006","journal-title":"Informing Science Journal"},{"key":"e_1_2_7_7_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gwizdka J. &Spence I.(2006).What can searching behavior tell us about the difficulty of information tasks? A study of web navigation. In A. Grove (Ed.) Proceedings of the 69th annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology(vol. 43). 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