Examining the Impact of the Internet and Domain Knowledge on Information Seeking Ability of Academic Researchers
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Chen, Ching-Yi
Abstract
The Internet has brought extreme changes to academic researchers’ information seeking behavior. After occurrence of the Internet, the concentration of citations declined year by year, which may indicate that with the help of the Internet, researchers can find more previously unnoticed documents, and they would not focus only on those highly-cited documents. This point of view supported the “long-tail” theory. However, the decline in concentration may be the result of increased publication volume after the Internet. So the present study aimed at investigating whether the Internet would affect information seeking of researchers so that they can search information more extensively, and find more previously unnoticed documents. Besides the impact of the Internet, this study also examined the impact of domain knowledge, and further determined whether the impact of the Internet would be different for researchers with different levels of domain knowledge.
By applying secondary-data analysis, this study found that the impact of the Internet is significant. After occurrence of the Internet, researchers found documents from less-noticed sources. The impact of domain knowledge, however, is only reflected in the number of relevant references and the journals selected by researchers. The interaction effect between the Internet and domain knowledge was found to be significant, which indicated that the impact of the Internet would be different for researchers with different levels of domain knowledge. For high knowledge researchers, the greatest impact of the Internet is to help them find documents from less-noticed sources. For low knowledge researchers, the greatest impact of the Internet is to help them find more relevant documents.
Subjects
Information Seeking
Long-tail Theory
the Internet
Domain Knowledge
Citation Analysis
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-100-R98725018-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):2c525acc5cafc658d7b640aac32f433e