Serendipitous Information Research Articles

Exploratory search in information systems: a systematic review

PurposeExploratory search activities are ubiquitous in various information systems. Much potentially useful or even serendipitous information is discovered during the exploratory search process. Given its irreplaceable role in information systems, exploratory search has attracted growing attention from the information system community. Since few studies have methodically reviewed current publications, researchers and practitioners are unable to take full advantage of existing achievements, which, in turn, limits their progress in this field. Through a literature review, this study aims to recapitulate important research topics of exploratory search in information systems, providing a research landscape of exploratory search.Design/methodology/approachAutomatic and manual searches were performed on seven reputable databases to collect relevant literature published between January 2005 and July 2023. The literature pool contains 146 primary studies on exploratory search in information system research.FindingsThis study recapitulated five important topics of exploratory search, namely, conceptual frameworks, theoretical frameworks, influencing factors, design features and evaluation metrics. Moreover, this review revealed research gaps in current studies and proposed a knowledge framework and a research agenda for future studies.Originality/valueThis study has important implications for beginners to quickly get a snapshot of exploratory search studies, for researchers to re-align current research or discover new interesting issues, and for practitioners to design information systems that support exploratory search.

Investigating the Impact of Serendipitous Information and Scarcity Messages on the Online Impulse Buying Behaviour of Consumers in the Apparel Industry of Sri Lanka: The Mediating Role of the Urge to Buy Impulsively

Investigating the Impact of Serendipitous Information and Scarcity Messages on the Online Impulse Buying Behaviour of Consumers in the Apparel Industry of Sri Lanka: The Mediating Role of the Urge to Buy Impulsively

Development of a scale for measuring individual propensity for serendipitous information encounters in an online environment

This article reports the development of a scale designed to measure an individual’s tendency to engage in serendipitous information encountering behaviour online. We relied on the simplified process model of information encountering to derive an initial item pool. In Study 1, a total of 3037 participants completed a preliminary 24-item scale. Using a split-half principal components analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to determine the underlying factor structure, we reduced the scale to 12 items. In Study 2 ( N = 66), we demonstrated the revised scale’s test–retest reliability and showed that it distinguishes between information encountering and other conceptually related constructs. In Study 3, behavioural data from 304 participants showed that the information encountering scale is associated with various indicators of online information-seeking, such as page visits and visit duration. Collectively, these studies yield a valid and easily implemented scale to better understand online information encountering. We describe the development of this scale and discuss its implications for both the measurement and study of serendipity in online information behaviour.

F-commerce and Impulsive Buying: A Mediated-Moderated Study from a Social Commerce Perspective

Purpose: Utilizing Social Impact Theory, this study explores browsing via F-commerce as a source of social interactions and enjoyment while stimulating consumer impulse buying behavior. Moreover, a mediating role of perceived trust and perceived usefulness to enrich the relationship between browsing and impulse buying is studied in two cross national cultures. Finally, a moderating role of serendipitous information and deal proneness is aimed to study the relationships. Method: Using a cross-lagged temporal approach, survey based data is collected from F-commerce users in developing context i.e. Pakistan (N=684). The data is analyzed by means of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Findings: The results demonstrate that browsing has positive impact on F-impulse buying as well as on perceived trust and perceived usefulness which in turn influences F-impulse purchase. Moreover, findings confirm the moderating role of deal proneness and serendipitous information in the hypothesized relationships. Implications: Managers in such markets should focus on e-tracking where consumers share and gather information related to their products and services. Placing serendipitous information on Facebook brand pages via brand evangelist might offer additional advantages to F-commerce marketers. By providing different online deals and discounts on products managers may motivate consumers to buy impulsively. Originality: Present study is of equal importance to academia and practitioners within emerging context as this study enriches the F-commerce literature by uncovering new areas, scrutinizes factors that influence F-impulsive purchase and the variations in the impact of these processes across serendipity and deal proneness.

Search a Great Leveler? Ensuring More Equitable Information Acquisition

AbstractThe ubiquitous search box promised to democratize knowledge access by making information universally accessible. But while many search engines cater well for certain user groups, information tasks and content types, they cater poorly for others. Poorly‐served users include those with certain types of impairment (e.g. dyslexia), and weakly‐supported tasks include highly exploratory goals, where it can be difficult to express information needed as a query. Furthermore, the overdominance of search functionality in many information environments has restricted support for other important forms of information acquisition, such as serendipitous information encountering and creative “inspiration hunting.” Search results and recommendations can also promote certain types of content due to algorithmic bias. Rather than act as a great leveler by making information acquisition effective, efficient and enjoyable for all, search engines often unfairly favor some types of user, task or content over others. In short, search is not always equitable. This panel discussion will elucidate the inequity of search as an information acquisition paradigm from multiple perspectives and propose design principles to ensure more equitable information acquisition.

Unexpected Relevance: An Empirical Study of Serendipity in Retweets

Serendipity is a beneficial discovery that happens in an unexpected way. It has been found spectacularly valuable in various contexts, including scientific discoveries, acquisition of business, and recommender systems. Although never formally proved with large-scale behavioral analysis, it is believed by scientists and practitioners that serendipity is an important factor of positive user experience and increased user engagement. In this paper, we take the initiative to study the ubiquitous occurrence of serendipitious information diffusion and its effect in the context of microblogging communities. We refer to serendipity as unexpected relevance, then propose a principled statistical method to test the unexpectedness and the relevance of information received by a microblogging user, which identifies a serendipitous diffusion of information to the user. Our findings based on large-scale behavioral analysis reveal that there is a surprisingly strong presence of serendipitous information diffusion in retweeting, which accounts for more than 25% of retweets in both Twitter and Weibo. Upon the identification of serendipity, we are able to conduct observational analysis that reveals the benefit of serendipity to microblogging users. Results show that both the discovery and provision of serendipity increase the level of user activities and social interactions, while the provision of serendipitous information also increases the influence of Twitter users.

Investigating the impact of emotions on perceiving serendipitous information encountering

AbstractDespite the potential importance of emotional aspects in information seeking, there is a lack of adequate attention to emotions' role in facilitating serendipitous information encountering. This paper contributes to this research gap by investigating the role of emotions during the process of perceiving and experiencing serendipitous information encountering in a controlled laboratory setting. The results show that applying a sketch game can stimulate participants' emotions. Our findings indicate that participants are more likely to experience serendipitous information encountering under the influence of positive emotions. This study contributes to an understanding of the relationship between emotions and the perception of serendipitous information encountering. The implications of the possibilities of facilitating positive emotions to induce serendipitous information encountering are discussed.

Concept-based Recommendation System for Finding Serendipity

Current information recommendation systems obtain users’ preferences from Web browsing histories and activities such as purchase of products, and efficiently provide the users with their preferable information. In such a case, however, the same or similar information is always recommended, which is called filter bubble and it decreases the users’ satisfaction to the systems. If information recommendation systems could provide users with something surprising and useful as output information, the user’s satisfaction to the systems would drastically increase. Therefore, “serendipity” is paid attention to in this research. In this paper, a new information recommendation system using a concept-based information retrieval is proposed to provide the users with serendipitous information. In this system, concepts which describe features or roles of items are input instead of the items themselves, and information which can meet the concepts are output as candidates of serendipitous information. The serendipitous information is extracted from the output information using the criteria which are the indexes of serendipity defined in this research. Through the evaluation experiment, it is revealed that the proposed system achieves the accuracy of 70% for the serendipitous information determination and the accuracy of 100% for the information retrieval, which are satisfactory for this research purpose.

Searching, sharing and singing: understanding the information behaviors of choral directors

PurposeThis article aims to help music librarians and other information professionals effectively understand and support communities of choral directors and other groups dependent on networking and serendipitous information encounters. In addition, through discussion and comparison of theories of information behavior, research articles and analysis of events and experiences, the article encourages thoughtful and practical applications of information behavior research.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper uses different theories of information behavior to outline three distinct modes of learning and knowing within communities of choral directors: individual searching, community expertise and serendipitous encounters.FindingsThe choral directing community is one that benefits not only from information support systems that emphasize individual information seeking, but also collaborative networking and serendipitous encounters with other community members. Librarians and other information professionals can best help this group discover new repertoire, plan concert programs, improve rehearsals and support other relevant activities through understanding and helping to provide access to professional music networks and being creative in providing opportunities for serendipitous information discovery.Originality/valueLittle information behavior research and discussion have focused specifically on the information practices of choral directors and how the format and schedule of a professional choral conference illuminate such practices and needs.

Analyzing the Influence of Situational Factors on Online Impulse Buying Behavior: A Study of Pakistani Consumers

This study seeks to find out online impulse buying behaviour in the Pakistan e-commerce industry by investigating the contributing factors of money availability, time availability, family influence, serendipitous information and scarcity messages towards online impulse buying behaviour. It investigated the mediating role of the urge to buy impulsively between the factors and online impulse buying behaviour. From a sample of 472 students of 4 Pakistani universities, the data was gathered. Moreover, to analyze the data and to test hypotheses, PLS-SEM was employed, which showed money availability, time availability, scarcity messages, serendipitous information, family influence were significantly related to online impulse buying behaviour. The findings will be helpful for e-retailers in creating e-marketing strategies, delivering their promises and generating sales through effectively designing their promotional plans.

‘Attention, attention, exploring minds acknowledge digital structure!’ The shift to digital humanities has happened, so what should information scientists do in response?

Abstract This article examines the impact of the digital humanities on information science and information scientists and how information scientists can contribute to digital collaborations in the digital humanities. This article uses three basic concepts—user-researcher, digital information system, and digital research object—as the framework for a description of the digital humanities shift and discusses the consequences of this shift for information science with reference to these concepts. The second part of the article investigates the two pillars of the digital humanities shift, acknowledgement of digital structure and the exploring mind, in more detail. In the case of correspondences, acknowledgement of digital structure involves respecting the ‘thing-like’ properties of letters that cannot be handled (searched, classified, etc.) unless they are translated into digitized metadata; this elevates metadata to genuine digital research objects. These theoretical issues are illustrated by the Prior archive, a collection of digitized letters, manuscript drafts, and other ‘grey’ material bequeathed from the New Zealand logician-philosopher Arthur Norman Prior. The concept of the ‘exploring mind’ is connected to a movement in information science, away from the needful user and information gap paradigm towards more open and exploratory information behaviour in the digital humanities. A concluding literature review examines selected works of information science that deals with non-standard, serendipitous information behaviour and identifies exploratory and serendipitous design features of information systems for the digital humanities. These features are represented in a taxonomy consisting of six design categories.

Virtual Serendipity: Preserving Embodied Browsing Activity in the 21st Century Research Library

As academic library collections are moved off site to make room for learning commons-type collaboration spaces, exploratory research processes (e.g. stacks browsing activities) are threatened. Given the range of benefits associated with chance information encounters in the physical book stacks, the disappearance of accessible collections is problematic. Fortunately, by focusing on embodied aspects of the physical browsing experience we can leverage emerging technologies to preserve instances of serendipitous information retrieval. Virtual reality, in this case, provides a browsing platform that allows for the type of search activity typically associated with research in the physical books stacks and preserves the benefits thereof.

Audiovisual Narrative Creation and Creative Retrieval: How Searching for a Story Shapes the Story

Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers - increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives. Retrieving audiovisual sources therefore requires an in-depth knowledge of how to find sources digitally. These storytelling practices intertwine search technologies with the user’s ideas and production cultures. This paper presents qualitative research insights into how media professionals search in digital archives to create (trans)medial narratives, and uses the notion of creative retrieval to unravel the dynamics of audiovisual narrative production. Creative retrieval combines ideas about the effects of media convergence on media content, theories about serendipitous information retrieval, and studies of creativity to argue that retrieval practices of media professionals who create audiovisual narratives are governed by organizational, technological and content affordances and constraints. The paper furthermore exemplifies the first stage of an ongoing research project in which a user-centered design approach guides open source self-learning search algorithm development to support creative retrieval.

After serendipity strikes: Creating value from encountered information

ABSTRACTExisting research into serendipitous information encountering has focused on how people stumble upon information, rather than how they create value from the information encountered. This online diary study with follow‐up interviews provides an enriched understanding of the subjective value of information encounters and the motivators, barriers and actions involved in creating value from them. We leverage our findings to generate design suggestions for digital information tools aimed at assisting in creating value from encountered information.

Aemoo: Linked Data exploration based on Knowledge Patterns

This paper presents a novel approach to Linked Data exploration that uses Encyclopedic Knowledge Patterns (EKPs) as relevance criteria for selecting, organising, and visualising knowledge. EKP are discovered by mining the linking structure of Wikipedia and evaluated by means of a user-based study, which shows that they are cognitively sound as models for building entity summarisations. We implemented a tool named Aemoo that supports EKP-driven knowledge exploration and integrates data coming from heterogeneous resources, namely static and dynamic knowledge as well as text and Linked Data. Aemoo is evaluated by means of controlled, task-driven user experiments in order to assess its usability, and ability to provide relevant and serendipitous information as compared to two existing tools: Google and RelFinder.

Supporting Creativity through the Interactive Exploratory Search Paradigm

ABSTRACTIn creative tasks, there is a need to explore the space of available information in order to come up with diverse views before converging to a solution. In such tasks, typical search engines that follow the direct search paradigm fail to inspire users. It is hypothesized that contrary to typical engines, interactive exploratory search, which aims at revealing latent, alternative directions in the information space enabling user orientation and engagement, is better suited to assist users in their quest for serendipitous discoveries and inspiration. In this study, an interactive exploratory search tool that combines diversification of content and sources with a user interface design that visualizes clues from the social chatter – generated with micro-blogging services such as Twitter – and lets users interactively explore the available information space is presented. A profiling service and recommendation module in charge of delivering personalized social content complements the setting. A pilot and two task-based user studies comparing our system to a query-based baseline indicate that our system significantly improves inspirational discoveries by providing access to more interesting and serendipitous information.

Temporal aspects of info-serendipity

Time has been explored under many different angles and contexts in the natural and exact sciences, as well as in the social sciences and the humanities. Nevertheless, the study of time and temporal aspects in relation to information serendipity is still in its early stages and quite limited. This article presents the topic of serendipitous information acquisition – i.e., fortuitous and unexpected discovery of valuable information – and highlights its key temporal expressions through a hermeneutic review of the current literature in the field of information science. The article explores and provides novel insights into four fundamental temporal aspects of serendipity: (1) temporal continuity and bi-directionality in the process of serendipity in information; (2) time frames of background concerns that lie at the basis of chance information encounters; (3) the semi-temporal classification of individuals who experience serendipity in information; as well as (4) temporal aspects of the benefits arising from such serendipitous episodes. The author calls for further exploration of temporal aspects involved and consecutive to such opportunistic discoveries of valuable information, within both information and time disciplines.

Engaging construction stakeholders with sustainability through a knowledge harvesting platform

With the new regulations and policies related to climate change, the construction industry has been put under pressure to increase the sustainability of its practices. Many organisations are now adapting their practices to meet government legislative targets (e.g. reducing carbon emissions) and consider the environmental, social and economic performance of buildings. In addition, the sustainable construction is also a rapidly changing field, with technological advances, changes in legislation and increasingly educated clients driving the industry to constantly adapt to remain competitive. This represents a key problem for construction professionals as they must continually be aware of new information, best practices, technologies and changing legislation (at a local, national and international level) which are often disseminated from different organisations/individuals through dispersed media.This paper presents a web-based platform solution that provides integrated access to sustainability resources in the form of interactive, dynamic, and user-oriented services that fully exploit latest advances in computing technologies. The platform is an open, scalable and polymorphic context-based solution with modules enabling serendipitous information and knowledge discovery by utilising a symbiosis of technologies such as semantic web, social networking and mobile computing. An initial prototype has been developed, implemented and tested followed by a revised platform which has now been released in a continuing process of incremental development to ensure a fully functional and accepted solution.

Potential of inducing serendipitous news discovery in social gaming environment

AbstractThis poster presents the preliminary findings from the study, which aimed to explore the potential of inducing serendipitous news discovery in social gaming environment. Erdelez' (2004) model of Information Encountering was used as a theoretical foundation to create a social game site, which was intended to provide a relaxed natural foreground activity for players without their awareness about serendipitous opportunity. A total of 269 players signed up to the site. Only half of those who signed up actually played and about 4% of those did what the game required to an extent that would allow them a chance to win prizes. Despite a low number of active players, there were 76 incidents of news clicks, which indicates serendipitous news discovery. About 29 participants clicked on news stories during their stay in the game site. The findings of this study indicate that social gaming environment is worth to explore further as a potential platform to facilitate serendipitous news discovery. The social game template created for this research could be used for various user‐engagement games to continue testing the idea of inducing serendipitous information discovery in natural context. A novel approach of measuring serendipitous news exposure using log data and data mining algorithm was developed as a result of this study.

Opportunistic discovery of information and millennials: An exploratory survey

AbstractNow that digital information can be accessed anywhere, there has been a resurgence of interest in information encountering (IE) and the opportunistic discovery of information (ODI). However, no studies have attempted to distinguish between the task‐oriented contexts associated with IE and the more diffuse and varied situations in which ODI occurs. The authors conducted a survey (n=48) of undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 25 in order to identify which mechanisms, formats, sources, and contexts provide them with opportunities for serendipitous information acquisition. Further, the survey was adopted to cover a variety of task‐specific (IE) and non‐task specific scenarios (ODI). The results of this exploratory study confirm that both IE and ODI seem to be common among this cohort, but the mechanism of delivery and the format in which the information is presented impact the frequency of occurrences.