Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists

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Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists

• Brad Hemminger
• bmh_at_ils.unc.edu
• School of Information and Library Science
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Contributors

• Assisting Researchers
• Jackson Fox (web survey)
• Steph Adams (participant recruiter)
• Dihui Lu (initial descriptive statistical
  analysis)
• Billy Saelim (continued statistical analysis)
• Chris Weisen (Odum Institute, statistical
  consultant)
• Feedback on Survey Design
• UNC Libraries Bill Burke (Botany), David Romito
  (Zoology), Jimmy Dickerson (Chemistry), Zari
  Kamarei (Math/Physics)
• KT Vaughan (Health Sciences Library)
• Cecy Brown (University of Oklahoma)
• Supported by
• UNC Libraries
• Carolina Center for Genome Sciences
• Basic Science Department chairs
• RENCI P20 grant

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Why Study Information Seeking Behavior of
Scientists

• Goal is to improve scholarly communications.
  Other areas of my research involve presentation
  aspects (visualization/computer human
  interaction) and the storage and communication of
  scholarly information (digital libraries,
  institutional repositories, virtual communities
  of practice).
• To do this we need to understand how people
  search out and use information currently, and
  why. As part of investigating this we found that
  there has been a significant change in the last
  5-10 years.
• So were studying ISB both to understand it, and
  to look at recent changes.

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How to Study the Information Seeking Behavior of
Scientists?

• Survey
• Reach many people
• Address common questions
• Produce lots of feedback for libraries
• Quantitative, models of variance (positivist
  approach)
• Interviews
• In depth coverage of selected groups
  (bioinformatics)
• Use grounded theory and critical incident
  techniques to capture more qualitative,
  contextual experiences
• Develop models of information processing and use

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Survey--Long Term Plan

• Conduct an initial survey study at UNC. Develop
  survey instrument and interview methodologies
  that work here, but could easily be applied on a
  larger scale.
• From the results of the initial UNC study, draft
  national version (with feedback from national
  sites).
• Run national study. Setup so that other sites
  only have to recruit subjects the entire survey
  runs off of UNC website. Hopefully this results
  in large number of sites and participants for
  minimal experimental costs.

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Survey Sampling Technique

• Census
• Need to be able to reach all members
• Best if can get response from large segment of
  population
• Results in potentially more input from wider
  audiences, especially for the open comment
  questions.
• Subject to bias (only computer users take, etc.)
• Random sample
• Statistically, generally a better choice
• Higher cost and significantly more work due to
  identifying and following up with individual
  subjects

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Questions

• Questions were based on
• Prior studies with which we wished to correlate
  our results. This is facilitated by authors who
  have published their surveys (in papers as
  appendix, e.g. Cecy Brown), and especially to
  folks who have put theirs collections of surveys
  online (e.g. Carol Tenopir).
• This allows us to compare results over time, as
  well as to clarify current practices (for
  instance whether print or electronic formats are
  usedand looking breaking this out into two
  questions, retrieval versus reading)
• Covering issues that our librarians were
  concerned about
• Developed during several drafts and that were
  reviewed by representatives from all libraries on
  campus.

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Survey Instrument Choices

• Paper
• Phone
• Email
• Web-based. While these can require more effort
  than anticipated, if the number of survey
  respondents is over several hundred it is
  generally more cost effective. This seemed the
  best choice since our pilot survey was of several
  thousand subjects, and our national survey was
  planned for tens of thousands. Since we have web
  and database expertise we were able to automate
  the process with minimal startup costs.
• Schonlau 2001, Conducting Research Surveys
  via E-mail and the Web.

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Data Acquisition Details

• PHP Surveyor used for web based survey. Another
  common choice at our school for simpler surveys
  is Survey Monkey. PHP Surveyor allowed us to ask
  multi-part questions, and to constrain answers to
  specific format responses.
• PHP Surveyor dumps data directly into MySQL
  database.
• Data is cleaned up then feed into SAS for
  analysis. (data cleaning is still a significant
  manual effort! Examples were determining
  Dept/CB, browsers that didnt validate datatypes
  on forms properly).

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Subjects and Recruitment

• Subjects are university faculty, grad students
  and research staff.
• We approached all science department chairs to
  get support first.
• Contact
• Initial contact was by email giving motivation
  for study, indication of support by deptscampus,
  and link to web-based survey.
• Follow-ups by letter, then two emails
• Flyers in department, Pizza Party Rewards

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Look at Survey

• 902 participants from recruited departments,
  which were classified as either science or
  medicine.
• Participation rate was 26.
• Participants by Department
• Survey

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Analysis

• For the quantitative response variables standard
  descriptive statistics (mean, min, max, standard
  deviation) are computed, and histograms are used
  to visualize the distribution.
• Categorical variables are reported as counts and
  percentages for each category, and displayed as
  frequency tables.

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Analysis Correlations

• Categorical vs Categorical
• Chi-square
• Categorical vs Quantitative
• Analysis of Variance
• Quantitative vs Quantitative
• Correlation
• Examples are by dept analysis of other features
  age vs preferred interface (Google or Library)

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Participants
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Gender
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Distance to Library
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Simple Questions

• Ninety-one percent of the participants had access
  to the internet in their office or lab.
• Do you maintain a personal article collection?
  Most all participants (85.4) responded that they
  did, while only 14.6 did not
• Do you maintain a personal bibliographic database
  for print and/or electronic references?, and
  52.2 of the participants did maintain one, while
  47.8 did not.

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How often do you use
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Most Important Individual Sources
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Important Alerts
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Tools for Searching Information
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Types of Information Sources
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Articles in Personal Collection
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Articles in Personal Article Collection that have
annotations
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Preferred Search Method
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Preferred Viewing Method
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Number of Visits to the Library in the past 12
Months
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Reasons for Visiting the Library
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Factors Affecting Choice of Journal to Publish In
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Google vs Library Search Page

• Which interface would you rather use to begin
  you search process? with the possible responses
  Google search page and Your librarys home
  page. Overall, a slight majority of users
  preferred Google (53.3) over the library page
  (46.7) however, the difference was
  substantially larger for basic science
  researchers (Google 58.5 versus Library 41.5)
  compared to medical researchers (Google 52.2
  versus Library 47.8).

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Google vs Library Search Page

• This difference may also be larger if the
  question had asked which style or type of
  interface the users preferred, as many of the
  comments in the survey indicated a strong
  preference for a single meta search tool where
  the user could enter a single search string that
  would result in all content in all resource
  collections being searched (as opposed to
  manually identifying resource collections and
  individually searching them).

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Summary
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We never leave our chairs

• Most all information seeking and use interactions
  occur on the researchers computer in their
  office.
• As a result library visits have dramatically
  declined, and the reasons for visits to library
  have changed.
• Researchers read both in electronic and print
  form, but print (paper) is still the most
  preferred form.

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Single Text Box MetaSearch

• Researchers prefer a single text box for initial
  searching, that covers all resources.
• This is most evidenced by preference for Google
  Scholar over library web page interfaces.

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More than just text

• Researchers are making increasing use of content
  contained in online databases like Genbank, or
  web pages of research labs.
• For the scientists in our survey this type of
  access has surpassed personal communications and
  is close to journal articles in frequency of
  usage by researchers.

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Transformative Changes

• Transformative collaborative group communications
  have already taken place in the consumer
  marketplace, and are finding their way into
  scholarly communications. Examples include
  folksonomies supporting community tagging
  (Del.icio.us), comment and review systems like
  Amazons rankings, FLickr, etc. Beginnings of
  similar changes are in their initial stages for
  scholarly communities, for instance Faculty of
  1000 and the Connotea application for online
  sharing of bibliographic databases and
  annotations by scientists.

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What might the future hold?

• In the future the researcher may all maintain all
  their scholarly knowledge online and make it
  accessible to others as they see fit. Having
  scholars descriptions and annotations of the
  digital scholarly materials as well as the
  materials themselves available on the web will
  allow online communities and community review
  systems to blossom, just like the availability of
  online journals articles has transformed basic
  information seeking of science scholars today.

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Future Work

• Upcoming papers from UNC survey
• Correlations, information seeking behavior
  predictions from demographics
• By department/research area comparisons
• Review and reflection on major changes (with Cecy
  Brown, Don King, Carol Tenopir)
• Textual analysis of library comments (Meredith
  Pulley)
• New work being proposed by other researchers
  using this data (if you think the data from this
  study might help you in your research come talk
  to me).
• National Study.about to begin
• Interview Studies (labs, individuals)
• bmh_at_ils.unc.edu