Search

Purpose Information seeking is often performed in collaborative contexts. The research into such collaborative information seeking (CIS) has been proceeding since the 1990s but lacks methodological discussions. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss methodological issues in existing CIS studies.Design/methodology/approach The authors systematically review 69 empirical CIS studies.Findings The review shows that the most common methods of data collection are lab experiments (43 percent), observation (19 percent) and surveys (16 percent), that the most common methods of data analysis are description (33 percent), statistical testing (29 percent) and content analysis (19 percent) and that CIS studies involve a fairly even mix of novice, intermediate and specialist participants. However, the authors also find that CIS research is dominated by exploratory studies, leaves it largely unexplored in what ways the findings of a study may be specific to the particular study setting, appears to assign primacy to precision at the expense of generalizability, struggles with investigating how CIS activities extend over time and provides data about behavior to a larger extent than about reasons, experiences and especially outcomes.Research limitations/implications The major implication of this review is its identification of the need for a shared model to which individual CIS studies can contribute in a cumulative manner. To support the development of such a model, the authors discuss a model of the core CIS process and a model of the factors that trigger CIS.Originality/value This study assesses the current state of CIS research, provides guidance for future CIS studies and aims to inspire further methodological discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to globally asked questions and information seekers to grab intellectual information in a contextual, concise, and meaningful format at the cost of investing a few minutes. The purpose of this paper is to present a common architecture, history, and a comprehensive review of such sites.Design/methodology/approach A critical and analytical investigation of the state-of-the-art SQA sites and relevant literature has been carried out with the intention to explore the noticeable features of such sites.Findings By studying relevant literature, and analysing a number of existing systems, a number of research challenges are identified and a generic architecture of SQA sites is contributed.Practical implications The review contributes a comprehensive knowledge about SQA systems and aims to be helpful to new researchers who want to get a broad picture of SQA systems on a single platform. The domain is in its infancy and requires tremendous efforts from the research community to explore its salient aspects with respect to the human world.Originality/value The study inspects SQA sites on a large scale and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, future research challenges, and a generic architecture of SQA sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]