Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, and Google Scholar: Comparing Search Performance Using User Queries

When the NCSU Libraries initially subscribed to the Summon Discovery Service in 2009, there were few other competitors on the market and none offered an API interface that could be used to populate the “Articles” portion of our QuickSearch application (http://search.lib.ncsu.edu/). Since then, EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) has emerged as a viable competitor. Using a random sample of actual user searches and bootstrap randomization tests (also referred to as permutation tests), the NCSU Libraries’s Web‐Scale Discovery Product Team conducted a study to compare the search performance of Summon, EDS, and Google Scholar