Information‐seeking behaviors of computer scientists: Challenges for electronic literature search tools

Abstract

Since the recent emergence of electronic literature resources, researchers have begun to adopt new informationseeking practices. The purpose of this research is to investigate the information needs and searching behaviors of researchers, and their implications for electronic literature search tools. We conducted mixed-method case studies involving interviews, diary logs, and observations of computer scientists followed by a web-based survey to validate our findings. The results show that computer science researchers have the following main purposes for seeking information: keeping up to date, exploring new topics, reviewing literature, collaborating, preparing lectures, and recommending material for students. We found that keeping up to date with research is the most frequent purpose and exploring unfamiliar research areas is the most difficult. Furthermore, we found that literature searching is a collaborative process and, depending on the search purpose, different information sources and navigation strategies are used. On the basis of these findings we discuss six design challenges for literature search tools, which are: providing support for keeping up to date with research, exploring unfamiliar topics, browsing user history, collaborating and sharing, performing a federated search that goes beyond scholarly research, and sorting and navigating the results.

Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta‐analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources

“…Users are perhaps guided by convenience rather than strategic considerations when choosing their search system. In fact, it was due to its great ease of use and performance in informational and exploratory searches that Google Scholar emerged as the number one go‐to academic search engine for most academic users . Students in particular utilize Google as a main source in information seeking .…”

Is exploratory search different? A comparison of information search behavior for exploratory and lookup tasks

“…To recruit participants we posted advertisements in the Computer Science (CS) department mailing list of the local universities. We selected researchers from the CS domain because they are the most active users of electronic bibliographic tools and web search is a major part of their daily work (Athukorala et al., ). Thirty‐two CS researchers participated in the study.…”

Supporting Exploratory Search Through Interaction Modeling

“…We refer to such SERPs as having narrow subjective result specificity. Generally, for such a narrow search query, a novice user would benefit from more introductory material about the topic such as Wikipedia articles, book chapters, and literature reviews as well as more guided support through the specific information space [3].…”

“…The findings suggested that exploring unfamiliar research areas was one of the most common purposes of scientific information seeking and it is the most difficult task to perform. We published these useful findings [3] and it inspired us to focus on scientific information seeking tasks.…”

“…In this research we are particularly interested in the information seeking behaviors of academics, because exploration of unfamiliar topics is one of the most common purposes of scientific searches [3] and if experienced information seekers such as researchers have problems with exploratory search, then it implies a more sever search problem for the rest of the users. Therefore, one of the contributions of this research is an exploratory study of the information seeking behaviors of academics.…”