Research On Knowledge-sharing Behavior In Academic Virtual Community Based On Users’ Familiarity Relationship

With the development of information networks and social media, academic virtual community has become a new platform for academic exchange. In academic virtual community, when users are going to gain and construct knowledge, they do not only depend on the contents of information, but also are influenced by the surroundings. As users’ information behavior transforms from system-oriented and mental-based to society-oriented and diversification, users’ relationship has became a new research focus in the field of Library and Information Science. The interpersonal relationship networks about interactions is the nature of virtual community, so the reaserches how on-line and offline relationship between users influences the efficiency and quality of knowledge-sharing have a great effect on the sound development of virtual community and reflect the development of information organization and service theory in the social networks.Because of the sepeciality of academic virtual community (most of users use their real name as ID), the interaction characteristic and the mechanism of action by familiarity is explored. Based on this, this paper refers Fei’s Acquaintance Relations and Granovetter’s theory of Strength of Ties to investigate the behavior characteristic and influencing factors based on familiarity relationship, and conducted the behavior pattern during the process of knowledge sharing in academic virtual communities, hoping to explore the mechanism of knowledge sharing by means of combination of user’s attribute data, relation data with ideational data.In this paper, the data on familiar user behavior characteristic and affected factors of knowledge sharing in virtual communities is collected by the means of observation, semi-interview and questionnaire, and processed by statistical analysis and SEM, integrating the qualitative and quantitative analysis. On the basis of the results of data analysis, the main conclusions of our research can be showed as follows:(1) Measurement frame of familiarity is constructed, and the measurement of knowledge-sharing behavior including knowledge contribution and knowledge getting and factors of knowledge-sharing behavior are collected form existed results and analyzed.(2) Differences of knowledge-sharing behavior among users with different individual backgrounds in academic virtual community are verified.(3) summarizing users’ behavioral characteristics during knowledge sharing, including sharing motivation, role, contents, and the relation between sharing frequency and research progress, and verifying the importance of familiarity relationship in knowledge sharing.(4) By verifying hypothesis of research and model modification, this article analyzes the influence factors and the relations between them, and finds that individual’s inherent mental factors positively affected knowledge-sharing behavior, but the external environment factors excluding familiarity negatively affect knowledge-sharing behavior.(5)Conducting the knowledge-sharing pattern among familiar users and explaining the mechanism of knowledge-sharing.