Reading patterns and formats of academic articles on the Web

Abstract

Various formats are being used for Web-based academic articles such as conference papers and journal papers. We surveyed the formats being used and tried to identify reading activities and the proper formats by carrying out two online surveys: an email-based survey with an email-based questionnaire and a Web-based survey with a Web-based questionnaire.The survey results show that readers overview Web-based academic articles from the screen, print them out and then read the printed articles. The results also show that the structural formats employed by most papers on the Web are against readers' preferences. The simple two-frame format was most preferred by 47% of the respondents as readers, but the cascade format of page windows was regarded as the worst by 65%. An interesting result is that 26% of the respondents selected as the worst style the paper-like format that is currently widely used for Web-based articles. Brief data sets and results are shown in this article.In addition, the importance of examples embedded in the Web-based questionnaire was shown by two consecutive surveys.