[Asis-l] New issue of Information Research

[Prof. Tom Wilson]

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The new issue of Information Research is now on the site:

http://InformationR.net/ir/

There is no theme to this issue of Information Research, just a set of papers 
that happens to come together, ready for publication at this time. However, 
there is some commonality of topic among the papers. Two deal with models of 
information seeking and/or searching, one deals with the relationship between 
personality factors and information behaviour, and the 'invited paper' from 
Professor Brenda Dervin, deals with the issue of diverse methodological 
approaches to 'user studies'. In other words, these four papers are firmly in 
the 'information behaviour' part of the information science spectrum. The odd 
one out is the paper by Gary Burnett and his colleagues on an hermeneutic 
approach to the identification of 'virtual communities'.

Brenda Dervin is well known in the 'information behaviour' community: her Sense-
Making Methodology has been adopted by many researchers in the field (although 
I suspect that, as with 'grounded theory', the method is not always implemented 
as rigorously as Brenda would expect) and her citations probably run into the 
thousands! 

Here, in Human studies and user studies: a call for methodological 
interdisciplinarity, Brenda makes a call for a genuine inter-disciplinary 
approach to 'user studies', to overcome the boundaries that academic 
researchers erect around themselves. She notes that research in the field has 
tended to pile up rather than add up, and concludes:
Without a coherent and methodologically informed approach to inter-
disciplinarity applied within the field, it will become impossible, even self-
defeating, to address the interdisciplinary information needs of constituencies 
amid the chaos of the cyber-spaced information confluence and collapsing 
disciplinary boundaries. 

Gary Burnett and his colleagues, in Inscription and interpretation of text: a 
cultural hermeneutic examination of virtual community ...adopt an 
anthropological perspective, yoked with a methodology based in hermeneutics, to 
illustrate how language use both reflects and influences culture in a virtual 
community. This is done by examining four samples of textual communications 
from the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.firewalls. The authors conclude that:
This study demonstrates that our conceptual model can provide the foundation 
for a richer understanding of culture in virtual environments that rely on text-
based communication for their interaction.

On conceptual models for information seeking and retrieval research, by Kalervo 
Järvelin and myself has, perhaps, an unusual history in that it has been in the 
making for about three years, as each of us has grappled with other problems 
while exchanging ideas on the emerging text. It began when Kalervo and I shared 
an office while he was on study leave in Sheffield. Fortunately, we are pretty 
compatible personalities and the sharing involved a great deal of humourous 
interchange. However, there was also serious interchange and the paper is the 
result of this - possibly demonstrating the value of the inter-disciplinary 
work called for by Brenda Dervin, since Kalervo is a computer scientist working 
in the field of information retrieval and I am a sociologist working in 
information behaviour.

Barbara NiedŸwiedzka's Proposed general model of information behaviour is the 
by-product of her Ph.D research on the information needs of managers in local 
government. She employed Wilson's model of information behaviour and this is 
her account of how she needed to modify the model to make it appropriate for 
this particular user group.

Finally, Jannica Heinström explores the relationship between personality traits 
(using the five-factor model of personality) and information behaviour among 
Finnish university students in Five personality dimensions and their influence 
on information behaviour. Heinström's conclusions are interesting; for example:
The final impact of personality on information seeking is dependent on the 
unique combination of traits which distinguish each individual. The more traits 
that incline towards certain information behaviour an individual possesses, the 
more likely it is that s/he will take on this behaviour. In some cases 
conflicting inclinations by different traits may neutralize the impact of 
personality traits, whereas in other situations, a strong personality 
characteristic may dominate and override other tendencies. This is the case for 
instance when a foremost conservative but conscientious person overcomes 
his/her cautious inclination towards confirming information by taking the 
effort to explore new challenging documents.

Once again, the authors reinforce the international character of the journal, 
representing Finland, Poland, the UK and the USA.
The 'best-seller' list

At the end of my previous Editorial I commented that it was becoming an 
increasingly time-consuming task to record the 'most hit' papers, now that all 
of the papers have counters. Following the last issue, I recorded on the Weblog 
a ranking of papers by 'hits per month', which took into account the number of 
months the page had had a counter - this revealed that some papers from the 
early issues were among the most hit papers, even though the counters had only 
been added to the paper at the end of 2002. Once again, this confirms the value 
of open-access, electronic publication.

It is too time-consuming to update that list regularly, but a quick examination 
of the papers suggests that there has been very little change in the overall 
ranking. Most interesting is the fact that there are papers from Volumes 1 and 
2 that appear in the top ten, even though those volumes have only had counters 
for less than a year. Again, the persistence of interest in the subjects 
represented by these papers confirms the value of open-access publication. It 
is worth noting that the 162 papers have now recorded a total of almost half a 
million hits (455,519), while the top page of the journal has recorded 154,461 
since April 1998. This suggests that using the top page counter as the measure 
of use is not a very good idea! It is better to think of every paper in the 
journal receiving 113 hits a month, or 1,356 hits a year, or the journal as a 
whole receiving more than 220,000 hits a year.

I hope you all enjoy this new issue and, remember, you can discuss the papers 
by registering with IR-DISCUSS at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ir-
discuss.html
Professor Tom Wilson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
October 2003