Online subject searching of humanities PhD students at a Swedish university

IF 1.7 3区 管理学 Q2 INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE
Koraljka Golub, Xu Tan, Ying-Hsang Liu, Jukka Tyrkkö
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Abstract

Purpose This exploratory study aims to help contribute to the understanding of online information search behaviour of PhD students from different humanities fields, with a focus on subject searching. Design/methodology/approach The methodology is based on a semi-structured interview within which the participants are asked to conduct both a controlled search task and a free search task. The sample comprises eight PhD students in several humanities disciplines at Linnaeus University, a medium-sized Swedish university from 2020. Findings Most humanities PhD students in the study have received training in information searching, but it has been too basic. Most rely on web search engines like Google and Google Scholar for publications' search, and university's discovery system for known-item searching. As these systems do not rely on controlled vocabularies, the participants often struggle with too many retrieved documents that are not relevant. Most only rarely or never use disciplinary bibliographic databases. The controlled search task has shown some benefits of using controlled vocabularies in the disciplinary databases, but incomplete synonym or concept coverage as well as user unfriendly search interface present hindrances. Originality/value The paper illuminates an often-forgotten but pervasive challenge of subject searching, especially for humanities researchers. It demonstrates difficulties and shows how most PhD students have missed finding an important resource in their research. It calls for the need to reconsider training in information searching and the need to make use of controlled vocabularies implemented in various search systems with usable search and browse user interfaces.
瑞典某大学人文学科博士生的在线主题搜索
目的本研究旨在了解不同人文学科博士生的网络信息搜索行为,并以学科搜索为重点。设计/方法/方法该方法基于半结构化访谈,其中参与者被要求进行受控搜索任务和自由搜索任务。样本包括林奈大学(Linnaeus University)几个人文学科的8名博士生,这是一所中等规模的瑞典大学,从2020年开始。研究中大多数人文学科博士生都接受过信息检索方面的训练,但这种训练过于基础。大多数人依靠像谷歌和谷歌学术这样的网络搜索引擎来搜索出版物,依靠大学的发现系统来搜索已知项目。由于这些系统不依赖于受控制的词汇表,因此参与者经常与太多不相关的检索文档作斗争。大多数人很少或从不使用学科书目数据库。在学科数据库中使用受控词汇表的受控搜索任务已经显示出一些好处,但同义词或概念覆盖不完整以及用户不友好的搜索界面是目前的障碍。这篇论文阐明了一个经常被遗忘但普遍存在的主题搜索挑战,尤其是对人文学科研究人员来说。它展示了困难,并表明大多数博士生在他们的研究中错过了一个重要的资源。它要求重新考虑信息搜索方面的培训,并需要利用各种搜索系统中实现的受控词汇表,这些系统具有可用的搜索和浏览用户界面。
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来源期刊
Journal of Documentation
Journal of Documentation INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE-
CiteScore
4.20
自引率
14.30%
发文量
72
期刊介绍: The scope of the Journal of Documentation is broadly information sciences, encompassing all of the academic and professional disciplines which deal with recorded information. These include, but are certainly not limited to: ■Information science, librarianship and related disciplines ■Information and knowledge management ■Information and knowledge organisation ■Information seeking and retrieval, and human information behaviour ■Information and digital literacies
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