Contributors PI, Brad Hemminger SILS Assisting Researchers –Jackson Fox (web survey) –Steph Adams (participant recruiter) –Dihui Lu (initial descriptive statistical analysis) –Billy Saelim (continued statistical analysis) –Chris Weisen (Odum Institute, statistical consultant) Feedback on Survey Design –UNC Libraries: Bill Burke (Botany), David Romito (Zoology), Jimmy Dickerson (Chemistry), Zari Kamarei (Math/Physics) –KT Vaughan (Health Sciences Library) –Cecy Brown (University of Oklahoma) Supported by –UNC Libraries –Carolina Center for Genome Sciences –Basic Science Department chairs –RENCI P20 grant

Why Study Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists? Goal is to improve scholarly communications. To do this we need to understand how people search out and use information currently, and why. As part of investigating this we found that there has been a significant change in the last 5-10 years (also seen by others). As a result we’re documenting the changes to help libraries provide better services, but more importantly we are trying to understand how researchers want to use information so we can build the best information systems to support this.

Look at Survey 902 participants from recruited departments, which were classified as either science or medicine. Participation rate was 26%. Participants by Department Survey

Simple Questions Ninety-one percent of the participants had access to the internet in their office or lab. Do you maintain a personal article collection?” Most all participants (85.4%) responded that they did, while only 14.6% did not Do you maintain a personal bibliographic database for print and/or electronic references?”, and 52.2% of the participants did maintain one, while 47.8% did not.

Articles in Personal Collection Number of Articles PrintPrint %ElectronicElectronic % none % % % % % % %446.61% %263.90%

How often do you use… Daily or Week ly % dailyweekly monthl yquarterly annuall ynever book 24% journal 87% preprint 18% conference 2% proceeding 5% webpage 70% online database 67% personal communic ation 52% other 1%

Preferred Search Method Science % MedicineMedicine % TotalTotal % Electronic versions of databases and journals Print versions of databases and journals

Preferred Viewing Method ScienceScience (%)MedicineMedicine (%) TotalTotal (%) Both/it depends electronic (computer) only print (hard copy) only

Number of Visits to the Library in the past 12 Months ScienceScience%Medicine Medicine %TotalTotal% % % % % % % % % % % % > %

Reasons for Visiting the Library Science Medicine Total photocopy % % % get assistance from a librarian %967.99% % use computers595.19% % % perform searches817.13% % % read current journals or other materials % % % quiet reading space % % % meeting453.96%736.08% % browse998.71%605.00% % pick up /drop off materials % % %

We never leave our chairs… Most all information seeking and use interactions occur on the researchers’ computer in their office. As a result library visits have dramatically declined, and the reasons for visits to library have changed. Researchers read both in electronic and print form, but print (paper) is still the most preferred form.

Single Text Box + MetaSearch Researchers prefer a single text box for initial searching, that covers all resources. This is most evidenced by preference for Google Scholar over library web page interfaces.

Transformative Changes Transformative collaborative group communications have already taken place in the consumer marketplace, and are finding their way into scholarly communications. Examples include folksonomies supporting community tagging (Del.icio.us), comment and review systems like Amazon’s rankings, FLickr, etc. Beginnings of similar changes are in their initial stages for scholarly communities, for instance Faculty of 1000 and the Connotea application for online sharing of bibliographic databases and annotations by scientists.

What might the future hold? In the future the researcher may all maintain all their scholarly knowledge online and make it accessible to others as they see fit. Having scholars’ descriptions and annotations of the digital scholarly materials as well as the materials themselves available on the web will allow online communities and community review systems to blossom, just like the availability of online journals articles has transformed basic information seeking of science scholars today.

Future Work Upcoming papers from UNC survey –Correlations, information seeking behavior predictions from demographics –By department/research area comparisons –Review and reflection on major changes (with Cecy Brown, Don King, Carol Tenopir) –Textual analysis of library comments (Meredith Pulley, KT Vaughan) ICIS tool for visualizing comments within schemaICIS –New work being proposed by other researchers using this data (if you think the data from this study might help you in your research come talk to me). National Study using this survey recently funded to cover 20 university sites in US for largest, most comprehensive survey. Individual Faculty Interview Study beginning

More than just text Researchers are making increasing use of content contained in online databases like Genbank, or web pages of research labs. For the scientists in our survey this type of access has surpassed personal communications and is close to journal articles in frequency of usage by researchers.

Tools for Searching Information Search tool typeFrequencyPercentage Citation index database % General web search engine % Fulltext digital library % Personal search tool % Knowledgebase web portal % Others % Online or local database % Library collection %

Participants PositionScience Science (%)Medicine Medicine (%)TotalTotal (%) professor associate professor assistant professor research staff/adjunct post graduate/fellow others doctoral student masters student

How to Study the Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists? Survey –Reach many people –Address common questions –Produce lots of feedback for libraries –Quantitative, models of variance (“positivist” approach) Interviews –In depth coverage of selected groups (bioinformatics) –Use grounded theory and critical incident techniques to capture more qualitative, contextual experiences –Develop models of information processing and use

Survey--Long Term Plan Conduct an initial survey study at UNC. Develop survey instrument and interview methodologies that work here, but could easily be applied on a larger scale. From the results of the initial UNC study, draft national version (with feedback from national sites). Run national study. Setup so that other sites only have to recruit subjects; the entire survey runs off of UNC website. Hopefully this results in large number of sites and participants for minimal experimental costs.

Questions Questions were based on –Prior studies with which we wished to correlate our results. This is facilitated by authors who have published their surveys (in papers as appendix, e.g. Cecy Brown), and especially to folks who have put theirs collections of surveys online (e.g. Carol Tenopir). –This allows us to compare results over time, as well as to clarify current practices (for instance whether print or electronic formats are used—and break this out into two questions, retrieval versus reading) –Covering issues that our librarians were concerned about –Developed during several drafts and that were reviewed by representatives from all libraries on campus.

Google vs Library Search Page “Which interface would you rather use to begin you search process?” with the possible responses “Google search page” and “Your library’s home page”. Overall, a slight majority of users preferred Google (53.3%) over the library page (46.7%); however, the difference was substantially larger for basic science researchers (Google 58.5% versus Library 41.5%) compared to medical researchers (Google 52.2% versus Library 47.8%).

Google vs Library Search Page This difference may also be larger if the question had asked which style or type of interface the users preferred, as many of the comments in the survey indicated a strong preference for a single “meta” search tool where the user could enter a single search string that would result in all content in all resource collections being searched (as opposed to manually identifying resource collections and individually searching them).