Anatomy of Scholarly Information Behavior Patterns in the Wake of Academic Social Media Platforms

TL;DR

This study explores how academic social media platforms influence researchers' information-seeking behaviors and identifies differences across disciplines, roles, and cultures, revealing new behavioral patterns in digital scholarly communication.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of international researchers' information needs and behaviors, highlighting the impact of social networks on scholarly activities and identifying new behavior patterns.

Findings

Academic social networks significantly affect scholarly activities.

Differences exist between students and faculty in social media use.

Researchers across disciplines show both similarities and unique behaviors.

Abstract

As more scholarly content is born digital or converted to a digital format, digital libraries are becoming increasingly vital to researchers seeking to leverage scholarly big data for scientific discovery. Although scholarly products are available in abundance-especially in environments created by the advent of social networking services-little is known about international scholarly information needs, information-seeking behavior, or information use. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps via an in-depth analysis of the information needs and information-seeking behavior of researchers, both students and faculty, at two universities, one in the U.S. and the other in Qatar. Based on this analysis, the study identifies and describes new behavior patterns on the part of researchers as they engage in the information-seeking process. The analysis reveals that the use of academic social networks has notable effects on various scholarly activities. Further, this study identifies differences between students and faculty members in regard to their use of academic social networks, and it identifies differences between researchers according to discipline. Although the researchers who participated in the present study represent a range of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, the study reports a number of similarities in terms of the researchers' scholarly activities.