Pull or push? Exploring graduate students’ source preferences in seeking academic information

Pu, Hsiao-Tieh

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/96722 Copy

Description

Title

Pull or push? Exploring graduate students’ source preferences in seeking academic information

Author(s)

Pu, Hsiao-Tieh

Issue Date

2017

Keyword(s)

• Academic information seeking behavior
• Information pull and push
• Information source horizon

Abstract

As information becomes more accessible nowadays, people obtain information through diverse sources and with different access patterns. This exploratory study employed interviews and participant-drawn information source maps to collect graduate students’ preferred sources as well as information access types in seeking academic information. The results show that the participants preferred information-intensive sources like electronic databases, institutional websites, and search engines; and real human sources like advisors and peers, while social media was less preferred sources. Most of the sources position as pull-oriented, and push-oriented sources were less occurred in academic contexts. The study also proposed an innovative representation of preliminary results combining two dimensions of source preferences and information access types. The semicircle spectrum diagram elucidates the participants’ academic information source horizon and provides a common phenomenon from a new perspective, which may spark interests for future related research.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

iConference 2017 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/96722

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2017 Hsiao-Tieh Pu

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