The principal task of information professionals is to satisfy the various information needs of users in different contexts, studying their requirements, their seeking habits and their management and use of information. According to information behaviour researchers, information seeking behaviour analysis is the study of the 'activities a person may engage in when identifying their own needs for...

BACKGROUND Globally, 5.9 million children under the age of five died in 2015. More than half and almost one-third of those deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, respectively. Diarrhea and Pneumonia, which were the major causes of the problem, accounted for more than two million deaths of the world's youngest children every year. Like other developing countries, child health serv...

In this paper we look at some of the problems in interacting with best-match retrieval systems. In particular, we examine the areas of interaction, some investigations of the complexity and breadth of interaction and attempts to categorise user's information seeking behaviour. We suggest that one of the diiculties of traditional IR systems in supporting information seeking is the way the inform...

This paper outlines a broad research agenda aimed at examining the manner in which individual differences in information seeking behavior interact with the search task to affect search outcomes. As part of this agenda, we describe specific experimentation that will assess the impact of both Need for Cognition (the tendency to elaborate upon, structure and evaluate information) and Selfand Other...

In this paper, we evaluate query term suggestion in the context of academic professional search. Our overall goal is to support scientists in their information seeking tasks. We set up an interactive search system in which terms are extracted from clicked documents and suggested to the user before every query specification step. We evaluated our method with the iSearch collection of academic in...

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...

The present study utilized data from the National Latino and Asian American Study to examine ethnic and generational differences in family cultural conflict and family cohesion and how the effects of such family conflict and cohesion on lifetime service use vary by generation status for Latino Americans (n = 2,554) and Asian Americans (n = 2,095). Findings revealed that first-generation Asian A...

African American adolescent boys underutilize mental health service due to stigma associated with depression. Gaining an increased understanding of how depressed, African American adolescent boys perceive their mental health needs and engage in help-seeking behaviors might play an essential role in efforts to improve their symptoms and access to care. Using a mixed-methods design, this study ex...

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...