Users' Information Behaviour when Using an Electronic Journal

RIS Review of Information Science, a full refereed electronic journal, has been published at the Department of Information Science, University of Konstanz, Germany since July 1996. This text firstly gives a brief introduction to RIS and then reports the main results of a study on the users’ behaviour when using RIS followed by a discussion on these results. The study is based on an analysis of WWW server log files. The results of the study are both interesting for understanding of users’ behaviour when using electronic journals in general and interesting for (re-)designing of scholarly electronic journals, in particular for RIS, as well. Scholarly communication is now moving into electronic age. Meanwhile, as one of the most important forms of future scholarly communication, electronic journals are growing dramatically. Electronic journals, just as the name already implies, are using Internet/WWW as their media for representing, distributing information and in their other activities. Because of their electronic nature, many limitations or disadvantages of traditional paper-based scholarly journals can be overcome. In addition, many value-added features will be easily made available and it is also possible that the communication function, which has been one of the fundamental functions of scholarly journals and which has mainly because of the serious time delay in the publication process been gradually lost, can be regained. Also because of the electronic nature of electronic journals, it is expected that users’ behaviour when using electronic journals will differ from that of printed journals. On the other hand, as noted by [Wilson1995], understanding of users’ information behaviour is very important for designing of successful information systems. Therefore, researches on users’ information behaviour when using electronic journals will be valuable for implementation and maintaining of electronic journals. Furthermore, it will also be interesting for the research of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). In this text the main results of an analysis of users’ information behaviour when using an electronic journal and a discussion on those results will be given.