Earlier this month I attended the Information Seeking Behaviour in Context conference — ISIC at Leeds University.
I was interested in exploring the field as represented by the conference submissions, so I extracted the references from the proceedings using pdfextract and looked at the authors and papers being cited by the attendees.
Citations in common
The following shows conference attendees linked by mutually cited authors.
Attendees toward the centre of the diagram are more integrative and some presented review studies. Those toward the edge are more likely to have been presenting interdisciplinary work having fewer overlaps with other papers, or simply had fewer references overall.
The colours are groups detected by the Gephi community detection algorithm. The number of groups discovered was fairly arbitrary, but common themes can be suggested for some of the main papers in each group:
colour | themes |
---|---|
Information sharing, groups and communities, overall trends in ISB | |
Methodologies (especially ethnographic approaches), aging | |
Affect, emotion, (especially in politics, health) | |
Gender-specific online behaviour | |
Avoidance, failure, cognitive factors in information seeking |
## Commonly cited authors
I also looked at common co-occuring authors in the attendees’ references — a way of viewing the most influential authors in the field — which gave me the following (width of edges proportional to the number of co-occurences.)
Click the image for a larger version
Common word pairings
This graph shows common terms in all papers with pairing occurrences denoted with the edge weights
Click the image for a larger version
Most referenced papers
For many of the papers a DOI could be resolved by the pdfextract tool. That said, this was by no means reliable or accurate and didn’t work well for books where it tended to find reviews rather than the book itself. Including such errors, the most commonly cited were:
- Savolainen, Reijo (2007) Information Behavior and Information Practice: Reviewing the “Umbrella Concepts” of Information-Seeking Studies (4) http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/517840
- Talja, Sanna (2006) Information Sharing (4) http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3670-1_7
- Wilson, T.D. (1999) Models in information behaviour research (3) http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/eum0000000007145
- Braun, Virginia (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology (3) http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
- Hastall, Matthias R. (2013) J. David Johnson / Donald O. Case (2012): Health Information Seeking. Oxford: Lang (3) http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/1615-634x-2013-3-429
- Hamilton, Barry W (2004) What is the question?: Kuhlthau, Carol Collier Seeking meaning: a process approach to library and information services. 2 nd ed. (3) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2004.10721693
- Talja, Sanna (2007) Editors Introduction: Special Issue on Discursive Approaches to Information Seeking in Context (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/517839
- Courtright, Christina (2007) Context in information behavior research (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/aris.2007.1440410113
- Shipman, Jean P. (2009) The Health Information Literacy Research Project (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.97.4.014
- Cortina, J. M. (2008) Book Review: Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA Sage (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1094428108324688
- DAVIES, BRONWYN (1990) Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5914.1990.tb00174.x
- Burnett, Gary (2001) Small worlds: Normative behavior in virtual communities and feminist bookselling (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.1102.abs
- WILSON, T.D. (1981) ON USER STUDIES AND INFORMATION NEEDS (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/eb026702
- Niemelä, Raimo (2012) A Screening Tool for Assessing Everyday Health Information Literacy (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/libri-2012-0009
- Bae, Younggue (2012) Sentiment analysis of twitter audiences: Measuring the positive or negative influence of popular twitterers (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.22768
- Chatman, Elfreda A. (1999) A theory of life in the round (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(1999)50:3%3C207::aid-asi3%3E3.3.co;2-#
- Kim, K.-S. (2011) Selecting quality sources: Bridging the gap between the perception and use of information sources (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165551511400958
- Zhang, Yan (2013) Facebook as a Platform for Health Information and Communication: A Case Study of a Diabetes Group (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9942-7
- Case, D.O.(2013) Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behaviour (3rd ed.)2013 6 Donald O Case Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behaviour (3rd ed.) Bingley Emerald 491 pp. 978-1-78052-654-6 45.95 hard cover (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/el-05-2013-0086
- Urquhart, Christine (2010) Information behaviour of women: theoretical perspectives on gender (2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00220411011016399
The full proceedings of the ISIC 2014 conference are forthcoming in the open access Information Research journal