How do researchers determine whether particular content will be appropriate for their needs?
It should come as little surprise that users assess research content based on its relevance to their requirements – be that an assignment for college, university or similar, or an investigation within a corporate R&D facility, for example. The user will employ keyword searches to find relevant material and then examine the results, looking for key prompts that signal a relevance to their work.
Importantly, users tend to just read the portion of content that is directly relevant to them rather than putting that content into context. For example, a common behaviour of researchers who use Google Books is that they do not exclude content accessed in ‘snippet view’ where, for copyright reasons, only a page or even just a sentence are available to view.
Of equal importance is accessibility. Users will typically favour research content which is immediately available to them either online or in their library. Researchers and students do not regularly make use of inter-library loans to acquire research content that cannot be accessed online. However, this is not always the case, especially with very niche research like food science and technology, where going the extra mile to source quality research is highly beneficial.
Savvy users will carefully assess the origin of research content and are aware of legitimate concerns among academics and librarians about the unregulated quality of content on the internet. However, their criteria for such assessment tend to be broad. For example, any published work tends to be viewed as authoritative – whether it has been peer-reviewed or not – and any work placed on a university server is thought to be trustworthy. Both of these assumptions may well be flawed!
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Researchers look for broad external indicators of quality (often, recommendations or citations) rather than assessing the content itself or looking closely at its more specific context. There seems to be a mixed awareness of the peer-review process that is usually taken as a sign of quality. Students in research-led universities, by and large, are more aware of it, possibly due to the advice and guidance given by their tutors and librarians.
Additionally, indexing hugely affects the success of researchers finding the right results, as detailed by our in-house expert, Carol Hollier:
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