National study of information seeking behavior of academic researchers in the United States

Abstract

As new technologies and information delivery systems emerge, the way in which individuals search for information to support research, teaching, and creative activities is changing. To understand different aspects of researchers' information-seeking behavior, this article surveyed 2,063 academic researchers in natural science, engineering, and medical science from five research universities in the United States. A Web-based, in-depth questionnaire was designed to quantify researchers' information searching, information use, and information storage behaviors. Descriptive statistics are reported. Additionally, analysis of results is broken out by institutions to compare differences among universities. Significant findings are reported, with the biggest changes because of increased utilization of electronic methods for searching, sharing, and storing scholarly content, as well as for utilizing library services. Generally speaking, researchers in the five universities had similar information-seeking behavior, with small differences because of varying academic unit structures and myriad library services provided at the individual institutions. IntroductionThe advent of personal computers and the Internet followed by the introduction of online electronic journals and databases at the beginning of the 1990s led to the development of online academic resources and the transformation JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 61(5): 2010 of the practice of scholarly communication. The ease of access and ease of use provided by electronic resources has made it easier for researchers to access and share scientific knowledge. Today, the use of online electronic resources has become widespread in almost all fields of scientific research. However, the impact of these new technologies varies considerably both across academic domains and institutions. In an effort to understand how scientists are responding to the transition to electronic communication, the NeoRef research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has conducted several surveys of academic researchers. This article reports results from the conclusion of a national study surveying academic researcher's information-seeking behavior at five universities. This national study follows the same methodology established in the initial survey of academic scientists initiated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Hemminger, Lu, Vaughan, & Adams, 2007). It extends this work to encompass four additional universities, to study differences among five universities in information-seeking behavior. The main research aims are to provide a baseline description of current informationseeking behavior of academic scientists on a national level as institutions change to primarily electronic communications, to understand where changes in behavior are occurring and why, and what theoretical and practical implications this has for information-seeking behavior models and for library services.This article is the first of three arti...

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