Interdisciplinarity and the information-seeking behavior of scientists

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Titre: Interdisciplinarity and the information-seeking behavior of scientists
Créateur: Jamali, Hamid R.; Nicholas, David
Date de publication: 2010
Langue: Anglais
Sujet: français Angle :: :: :: Pratique :: :: :: Pratique informationnelle
Description: Cet article étudie l'impact du degré d'interdisciplinarité sur le comportement de recherche d'information des chercheurs en physique et en astronomie. Les auteurs analysent comment la transversalité entre sous-disciplines influence la fréquence de recherche, les méthodes de veille scientifique, ainsi que la dépendance accrue envers les moteurs de recherche et les bases de données multidisciplinaires.
Résumé: Adopting an intradisciplinary perspective, this article evaluates the information-seeking behavior of academics from different subfields of physics and astronomy. It investigates the effect of interdisciplinarity (reliance on the literature of other subjects) and the scatter of literature on two aspects of the information-seeking behavior: methods used for keeping up-to-date and for identifying articles. To this end a survey of 114 PhD students and staff at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University College London was carried out. The findings showed that the subfields that are more interdisciplinary or have a more scattered literature are more likely to use general search facilities for finding information. The study also showed that cross-disciplinary use of the literature is not necessarily an indicator of scattered literature. The study reveals intradisciplinary differences among physicists and astronomers in terms of their information-seeking behavior and highlights the risk of overlooking the characteristics of information-seeking behavior of specialized subject communities by focusing on very broad subject categories.
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Source: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0306457310000063
Droits: https://www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/