Trails across the heterogeneous information environment: Manual integration patterns of search systems in molecular medicine

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    10 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to aim at modelling the trails, which are search patterns with several search systems across the heterogeneous information environment. In addition, the author seeks to examine what kinds of trails occur in routine, semi-complex and complex tasks, and what barrier types occur during the trail-blazing. Design/methodology/approach – The author used qualitative task-based approach with shadowing of six molecular medicine researchers during six months, and collected their web interaction logs. Data triangulation made this kind of detailed search system integration analysis possible. Findings – Five trail patterns emerged: branches, chains, lists, singles and berrypicking trails. The berrypicking was typical to complex work tasks, whereas the branches were common in routine work tasks. Singles and lists were employed typically in semi-complex tasks. In all kinds of trails, the barriers occurred often during the interaction with a single system, but there was a considerable number of barriers with the malfunctioning system integration, and lacking integration features. The findings propose that the trails could be used to reduce the amount of laborious manual system integration, and that there is a need for support to explorative search process in berrypicking trails. Originality/value – Research of information behaviour yielding to different types of search patters with several search systems during real-world work task performance in molecular medicine have not been published previously. The author presents a task-based approach how to model search behaviour patterns. The author discusses the issue of system integration, which is a great challenge in biomedical domain, from the viewpoints of information studies and search behaviour.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)856-877
    Number of pages22
    JournalJOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION
    Volume70
    Issue number5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2014
    Publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

    Keywords

    • Empirical study
    • Information retrieval
    • Task-based information searching
    • information interaction
    • search trails
    • task-based information access

    Publication forum classification

    • Publication forum level 3

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