IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamest/v50y1999i10p929-943.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Information seeking behavior of scientists in the electronic information age: Astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, and physicists

Author

Listed:
  • Cecelia M. Brown

Abstract

The information seeking behavior of astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, and physicists at the University of Oklahoma was assessed using an electronically distributed questionnaire. All of the scientists surveyed relied greatly on the journal literature to support their research and creative activities. The mathematicians surveyed indicated an additional reliance on monographs, preprints, and attendance at conferences and personal communication to support their research activities. Similarly, all scientists responding scanned the latest issues of journals to keep abreast of current developments in their fields, with the mathematicians again reporting attendance at conferences and personal communication. Despite an expression by the scientists for more electronic services, the majority preferred access to journal articles in a print, rather than an electronic, form. The primary deficit in library services appeared to be in access to electronic bibliographic databases. The data suggest that a primary goal of science libraries is to obtain access to as many appropriate electronic bibliographic finding aids and databases possible. Although the results imply the ultimate demise of the printed bibliographic reference tool, they underscore the continued importance to scientists of the printed peer‐reviewed journal article.

Suggested Citation

  • Cecelia M. Brown, 1999. "Information seeking behavior of scientists in the electronic information age: Astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, and physicists," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 50(10), pages 929-943.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:50:y:1999:i:10:p:929-943
    DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:103.0.CO;2-G
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:103.0.CO;2-G
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:103.0.CO;2-G?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jin Mao & Yujie Cao & Kun Lu & Gang Li, 2017. "Topic scientific community in science: a combined perspective of scientific collaboration and topics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(2), pages 851-875, August.
    2. Xi Niu & Bradley M. Hemminger & Cory Lown & Stephanie Adams & Cecelia Brown & Allison Level & Merinda McLure & Audrey Powers & Michele R. Tennant & Tara Cataldo, 2010. "National study of information seeking behavior of academic researchers in the United States," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(5), pages 869-890, May.
    3. Lanu Kim & Jason H. Portenoy & Jevin D. West & Katherine W. Stovel, 2020. "Scientific journals still matter in the era of academic search engines and preprint archives," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 71(10), pages 1218-1226, October.
    4. Bhaskar Mukherjee, 2009. "Scholarly research in LIS open access electronic journals: A bibliometric study," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 80(1), pages 167-194, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:50:y:1999:i:10:p:929-943. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.