Introduction. Use of the Internet for open Web searches is common among university students in academic learning tasks. The tools used by students to find relevant information for online assessment tasks were investigated and their information seeking behaviour was documented to explore the impact on assessment design. Method. A mixed methods approach was followed, using recorded observations o...

Navigating through the ever-changing information space is becoming increasingly difficult. Social navigation support is a technique for guiding users to interesting and relevant information by leveraging the browsing behavior of past users. Effect of social navigation support on users’ information seeking behavior has been studied mostly from conceptual basis or under natural experiments. In th...

This paper compares doctoral students and faculty members’ referencing behavior through the analysis of a large corpus of scientific papers. It shows that doctoral students tend to cite more documents per paper than faculty members, and that the literature they cite is, on average, more recent. It also demonstrates that doctoral students cite a larger proportion of conference proceedings and jo...

Communication processes between governments and businesses are increasingly networked. This paper increases our understanding of the information seeking behavior of businesses in the Government-to-Business domain. We conducted a quantitative study among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Netherlands to discover source-channel interaction. The results provided several interactions regardi...

Several authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software maintenance activities. However, there is little research in the literature describing holistic information-seeking models in this context. Additionally, in the one instance where an information-seeking model has been proposed, the empirical evidence presented in support of that model is extrem...

Professional search in an engineering context includes users on different stages from novice to expert. We discuss how searching as learning can help to understand searching in a larger information seeking, workspace, and learning environment, giving users the tools and understanding to become experts over time. We present some findings of user interaction with engineering domain retrieval syst...

The study investigated the process of information channel selection of Jewish studies scholars in Israel according to two theoretical frameworks, the ‘cost–benefit ratio’ that focused on the quality of the information provided by the channel and the ‘least effort principle’ that focused on the accessibility of the channel. The study sought to identify which of the two parameters, quality of inf...

We develop methods to compare the positions of quantitative trait loci (QTL) with a set of genes selected by other methods, such as microarray experiments, from a sequenced genome. We apply our methods to QTL for addictive behavior in mouse, and a set of genes upregulated in a region of the brain associated with addictive behavior, the nucleus accumbens (NA). The association between the QTL and...

Some psychoactive drugs are abused because of their ability to act as reinforcers. As a consequence behavioural patterns (such as drug-seeking/drug-taking behaviours) are promoted that ensure further drug consumption. After prolonged drug self-administration, some individuals lose control over their behaviour so that these drug-seeking/taking behaviours become compulsive, pervading almost all l...