Author:
Jamali Hamid R.,Nicholas David
Abstract
PurposeThe study aims to examines two aspects of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for keeping up‐to‐date and methods used for finding articles. The relationship between academic status and research field of users with their information seeking behaviour was investigated.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered using a questionnaire survey of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate) participated in the survey.FindingsThe study reveals differences among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of information‐seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of scientists.Originality/valueThe study is the first to deeply investigate intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information‐seeking behaviour of scientists in a discipline. It is also an up‐to‐date account of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers.
Subject
Library and Information Sciences,Information Systems
Reference18 articles.
1. Brown, C.M. (1999a), “Information literacy of physical science graduate students in the information age”, College & Research Libraries, Vol. 60 No. 5, pp. 426‐38.
2. Brown, C.M. (1999b), “Information seeking behavior of scientists in the electronic information age: astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, and physicists”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 50 No. 10, pp. 929‐43.
3. Cho, A. (2000), “Distorted galaxies point to dark matter”, Science, Vol. 287 No. 5460, pp. 1899‐901.
4. Ellis, D., Cox, D. and Hall, K. (1993), “A comparison of the information seeking patterns of researchers in the physical and social sciences”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 49 No. 4, pp. 356‐69.
5. Fry, J. (2003), “Cultural shaping of scholarly communication within academic specialisms”, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Brighton, Brighton.
Cited by
35 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献