  Finding relevant research literature in online databases is a familiar
challenge to all researchers. General search approaches trying to tackle this
challenge fall into two groups: one-time search and life-time search. We
observe that both approaches ignore unique attributes of the research domain
and are affected by concept drift. We posit that in searching for research
papers, a combination of a life-time search engine with an explicitly-provided
context (project) provides a solution to the concept drift problem. We
developed and deployed a project-based meta-search engine for research papers
called Rivendell. Using Rivendell, we conducted experiments with 199 subjects,
comparing project-based search performance to one-time and life-time search
engines, revealing an improvement of up to 12.8 percent in project-based search
compared to life-time search.
