Tracking the Scholarly Influence of Dervin’s First Paper on Sense-Making Methodology

Brenda Dervin presented a paper in 1983 titled “An Overview of Sense-Making Research: Concepts, Methods and Results to Date” at a conference. She presented the “Sense-Making Methodology (SMM)” in the 1983 paper with the introduction of its core concepts, methods, and applications. SMM is a user-centered theory for methodology and has been widely applied to a wide range of fields. The findings of this study show that the 1983 paper has a longterm influence on other research articles and its influence has expanded into more disciplines and topics over time. Most of 283 articles citing the 1983 paper were information behavior articles published in journals of library and information science. This study contributes to confirm that the primary influence of this 1983 paper was established by a few concepts related to SMM. Not all three basic concepts constructing the SMM, “gaps”, “situations”, and “uses”, were the most influential concepts in terms of number of citation contexts. “Gaps” was the most frequently cited concept related to SMM (17.5%), closely followed by “sense-making/nonsense-making (17.3%)”. However, “SMM” was the most influential concept in terms of number of research topics of citing articles.