How professionals read online documents to formulate recommendations

Abstract

In the presented study seven participants read two sets of articles that were used to formulate recommendations regarding two technical communication issues.Readers proved to be not only driven by their judgment task, but by the articles they were reading as well. This strategy reduced reading efficiency. An electronic notepad was used to store copied citations from the articles. Readers evaluated these citations superfirially during reading, while they evaluated them more thoroughly when the recommendations had to be written.