Information-seeking behaviors of computer scientists: Challenges for electronic literature search tools

Since the recent emergence of electronic literature resources, researchers have begun to adopt new information-seeking practices. The purpose of this research is to investigate the information needs and searching behaviors of researchers, and their implications for electronic literature search tools. We conducted mixed-method case studies involving interviews, diary logs, and observations of computer scientists followed by a web-based survey to validate our findings. The results show that computer science researchers have the following main purposes for seeking information: keeping up to date, exploring new topics, reviewing literature, collaborating, preparing lectures, and recommending material for students. We found that keeping up to date with research is the most frequent purpose and exploring unfamiliar research areas is the most difficult. Furthermore, we found that literature searching is a collaborative process and, depending on the search purpose, different information sources and navigation strategies are used. On the basis of these findings we discuss six design challenges for literature search tools, which are: providing support for keeping up to date with research, exploring unfamiliar topics, browsing user history, collaborating and sharing, performing a federated search that goes beyond scholarly research, and sorting and navigating the results.