Abstract
This study examines how social scientists arrive at and utilize information in the course of their research. Results are drawn about the use of information resources and channels to address information inquiry, the strategies for information seeking, and the difficulties encountered in information seeking for academic research in today’s information environment. These findings refine the understanding of the dynamic relationship between information systems and services and their users within social-scientific research practice and provide implications for scholarly information-system development
Highlights
This study examines how social scientists arrive at and utilize information in the course of their research
More fully developed techniques for behavioral models emerged in the 1990s. Folster summarized these studies done over decades and concluded that (1) social scientists place a high importance on journals; (2) most of their citation identification comes from journals; (3) infor mal channels, such as consulting colleagues and attend ing conferences, are an important source of information; (4) library resources, such as catalogs, indexes, and librar ians, are not very heavily utilized; and (5) computerized services are ranked very low in their importance to the research process
The INFROSS project (Investigation into Information Requirements of the Social Scientist) studied the informa tion needs of British social scientists in the late 1960s and early 1970s and found that they preferred to use journal citations instead of traditional bibliographic tools, and that they tended to consult with colleagues and subject experts, rather than library catalogs or librarians in order to locate information.[2]
Summary
This study examines how social scientists arrive at and utilize information in the course of their research. A process organizes knowledge in a way that is especially useful to practitioners whose shared learning brings value to a community.[16] Pragmatically, the exami nation of context-based research processes draws “atten tion away from abstract knowledge and cranial processes and situates it in the practice and communities in which knowledge takes on significance.”[17] What is learned is highly dependent in the context on which the learning takes place, as it is central to the transfer and consump tion of information This requires “looking at the actual practice of work, which consists of a myriad of finegrained improvisations that are unnoticed in any formal mapping of work tasks.”[18] Such beliefs are utilized in this present study to approach and explain information-seek ing behavior among social scientists. The main research ques tions are: (1) how do social scientists make use of different information sources and channels to satisfy their infor mation needs? (2) what strategies do they apply when seeking information for academic research? and, (3) what difficulties are encountered in searching for supporting information seeking in acadAeRmTiIcCLrEesTeITaLrEc h | A| U TsHhOenR information? Information service providers should find the results of this study interesting because identifying users’ perceptions of the information environment pro vides guidance for information-system development that will closely reflect or accommodate the information-seek ing activities of social scientists
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