This paper outlines a broad research agenda aimed at examining the manner in which individual differences in information seeking behavior interact with the search task to affect search outcomes. As part of this agenda, we describe specific experimentation that will assess the impact of both Need for Cognition (the tendency to elaborate upon, structure and evaluate information) and Selfand Other...

In this paper, we evaluate query term suggestion in the context of academic professional search. Our overall goal is to support scientists in their information seeking tasks. We set up an interactive search system in which terms are extracted from clicked documents and suggested to the user before every query specification step. We evaluated our method with the iSearch collection of academic in...

Introduction. Use of the Internet for open Web searches is common among university students in academic learning tasks. The tools used by students to find relevant information for online assessment tasks were investigated and their information seeking behaviour was documented to explore the impact on assessment design. Method. A mixed methods approach was followed, using recorded observations o...

Navigating through the ever-changing information space is becoming increasingly difficult. Social navigation support is a technique for guiding users to interesting and relevant information by leveraging the browsing behavior of past users. Effect of social navigation support on users’ information seeking behavior has been studied mostly from conceptual basis or under natural experiments. In th...

This paper compares doctoral students and faculty members’ referencing behavior through the analysis of a large corpus of scientific papers. It shows that doctoral students tend to cite more documents per paper than faculty members, and that the literature they cite is, on average, more recent. It also demonstrates that doctoral students cite a larger proportion of conference proceedings and jo...

Communication processes between governments and businesses are increasingly networked. This paper increases our understanding of the information seeking behavior of businesses in the Government-to-Business domain. We conducted a quantitative study among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Netherlands to discover source-channel interaction. The results provided several interactions regardi...

Several authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software maintenance activities. However, there is little research in the literature describing holistic information-seeking models in this context. Additionally, in the one instance where an information-seeking model has been proposed, the empirical evidence presented in support of that model is extrem...

Professional search in an engineering context includes users on different stages from novice to expert. We discuss how searching as learning can help to understand searching in a larger information seeking, workspace, and learning environment, giving users the tools and understanding to become experts over time. We present some findings of user interaction with engineering domain retrieval syst...

The study investigated the process of information channel selection of Jewish studies scholars in Israel according to two theoretical frameworks, the ‘cost–benefit ratio’ that focused on the quality of the information provided by the channel and the ‘least effort principle’ that focused on the accessibility of the channel. The study sought to identify which of the two parameters, quality of inf...

purpose: scientific databases are the most important and useful sources where information is accessible via user interfaces. one of the approaches to eliminating the existing challenges in databases user interface is utilizing the sense-making theory (smt) approach. smt approach helps the users to understand problematic situations they have faced with and bridges the cognitive and information g...