LIMB may be related to gender and relationship tie strength and appears more internally than externally motivated. Further LIMB research is warranted.

Purpose -In this paper the authors seek to compare lay (consumer) and professional (physician) discourse structures in answers to diabetes-related questions in a public consumer health information website. Design/methodology/approach -Ten consumer and ten physician question threads were aligned. They generated 26 consumer and ten physician answers, constituting a total dataset of 717 discourse units (in sentences or sentence fragments). The authors depart from previous LIS health information behaviour research by utilizing a computational linguistics-based theoretical framework of rhetorical structure theory, which enables research at the pragmatics level of linguistics in terms of the goals and effects of human communication.Findings -The authors reveal differences in discourse organization by identifying prevalent rhetorical relations in each type of discourse. Consumer answers included predominately (66 per cent) presentational rhetorical structure relations, those intended to motivate or otherwise help a user do something (e.g. motivation, concession, and enablement). Physician answers included mainly subject matter relations (64 per cent), intended to inform, or simply transfer information to a user (e.g. elaboration, condition, and interpretation).Research limitations/implications -The findings suggest different communicative goals expressed in lay and professional health information sharing. Consumers appear to be more motivating, or activating, and more polite (linguistically) than physicians in how they share information with consumers online in similar topics in diabetes management. The authors consider whether one source of information encourages adherence to healthy behaviour more effectively than another. Originality/value -Analysing discourse structure -using rhetorical structure theory -is a novel and promising approach in information behaviour research, and one that traverses the lexico-semantic level of linguistic analysis towards pragmatics of language use.

While previous general models of information seeking and behavior do not address proxy information behavior in-depth (e.g., Belkin 1980;Krikelas, 1983;Taylor, 1962;Wilson, 1999), several researchers describe specific types of lay mediary information behaviors. Gross (1995) and Gross and Saxton (2001), for example, studied proxy information seeking in school and public library environments. From this, Gross identified the "imposed query," which distinguished between se lf-generated or internally-motivated and externally-motivated information seeking characterized by the activities of "imposers" and those they impose queries upon (" proxies" or "agents").Erdelez (1997) studied information seeking among undergraduate and graduate students and discovered a behavior she describes as "informati on encountering," which focuses on individuals' ability to unexpectedly discover and sometimes share information found via various channels, including the Web (Erdelez & Rioux, 2000;Rioux, 2000). Rioux developed the concept "information-acquiring-and-sharing" or IA&S

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Purpose -In this paper we respond to Urquhart and Urquhart's critique of our previous work entitled "Discourse structure differences in lay and professional health communication", published in this journal in 2012 (Vol. 68 No. 6, pp.826 -851, doi: 10.1108/00220411211277064).Design/methodology/approach -We examine Urquhart and Urquhart's critique and provide responses to their concerns and cautionary remarks against cross-disciplinary contributions. We reiterate our central claim.Findings -We argue that Mann and Thompson's (1987Thompson's ( , 1988 Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) offers valuable insights into computer-mediated health communication and deserves further discussion of its methodological strength and weaknesses for application in LIS.Research limitations/implications -While we agree that some methodological limitations pointed out by Urquhart and Urquhart are valid, we take this opportunity to correct certain misunderstandings and misstatements.Originality/value -We argue for continued use of innovative techniques borrowed from neighboring disciplines, in spite of objections from the researchers accustomed to a familiar strand of literature. We encourage researchers to consider RST and other computational linguistics-based discourse analysis annotation frameworks that could provide the basis for integrated research, and eventual applications in information behaviour and information retrieval. ABRAHAMSON & RUBIN (2015) --PREPRINT