Researchers' information needs in the bibliographic database: A literature review

Abstract

This article presents a literature review whose aim was to identify the reported information needs of researchers when they consult bibliographic databases. Initially, 192 articles were retrieved using Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. After applying the criteria for exclusion, the number of articles was reduced to 16, which is already an indicator of the small number of studies on this specific topic. The results show that it is hard to identify the information needs of researchers. They also show that the researchers have been requiring information with a higher degree of granularity. We conclude that although the available studies provide important information about the researchers' information needs and hints on how to address them, there is a need for more in-depth studies. The results of these deeper studies may be useful to serve as an indication for the creation of new procedures and tools, including those based on new metadata elements drawn to improve search results on Linked Open Data tools.

Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service

“…Although publications in the humanities are also of interest to students and the general public, research so far has mainly focused on the information needs of humanities scholars. Professional researchers in general require information with a high level of granularity when looking for information in bibliographic databases (De Andrade and Baptista, 2014), and this can be facilitated by applying indexing at a deep level of specificity. A major study of online database searching by humanities scholars was conducted over a two-year period by Bates and colleagues at Getty in 1990s combined search-log analysis and interviews (final report is given in Bates, 1996).…”

Toward a conceptual framework of health crisis information needs: an analysis of COVID-19 questions in a Chinese social Q&A website

“…Inspired by Taylor's work, extensive literature has explored multiple interpretations of information needs in many novel research contexts (Savolainen, 2017; Wilson, 2018). The concept is transdisciplinary as it crosses many research fields such as health (Clarke et al , 2016; Zimmerman, 2017), academics (De Andrade and Baptista, 2014; Shenton, 2008; Zeit, 2014), agriculture (Elly and Epafra Silayo, 2013; Kostagiolas et al , 2014), business and management (Lalević Filipović, 2015; Strampelli, 2018) and citizen community (Hirwade, 2010; Islam and Ahmed, 2012). However, health fields seem to focus the most on information needs (Wilson, 2018, pp.…”

Fuzzy Latent Semantic Query Expansion Model for Enhancing Information Retrieval

“…As part of the means to obtain a more relevant document from query posted by different users, Query refinement [3] became an essential information retrieval approach that interactively recommends new terms related to a particular user query in other to improve the quality of such query. Although, from the perspective of a user, the traditional way to meet her information need would be to perform an exhaustive review of contents from physical and digital documents [4]. However, with query refinement, whenever users interact with a retrieval system, the system provides term excerpts that are considered relevant to a particular user query as an ideal behavior.…”