The Information Seeking Behaviour Research Community

Domain analysis of researchers in ISB
Research
Author

PM

Published

September 29, 2014

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.

conference attendee network

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

top info seeking researchers

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

top info seeking researchers

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:

The full proceedings of the ISIC 2014 conference are forthcoming in the open access Information Research journal