A Study of Academic Search Scenarios and Information Seeking Behaviour

An important contribution in the development of interactive information retrieval as a research discipline has been the specification of information seeking models. A variety of such models have been documented, some of which apply generally to a broad set of search settings, and others which are specific to settings such as academic search. Within the domain of academic search, it is unclear to what extent searchers employ the strategies specified in such models when faced with different types of information needs (ranging from fact verification to knowledge discovery). Using an online questionnaire that presented four different academic search scenarios, we collected data on the self-reported likelihood of researchers (professors, graduate students) to use specific strategies from each of five different information seeking models. Preliminary analysis of data from a pilot study (n=10) has revealed differences in which of the strategies are employed depending on the type of search scenario as well as the level of expertise of the searcher.