A Study On Information Searching Behaviour Of Open Access User

With the development of Open Access, the increasing number of documents in Open Access repositories leads to difficulties for users in finding articles and negative impact on the rate of article sharing. As a result, how to help users of Open Access search documents more efficiently and effectively becomes a critical problem. Research on the understanding of information searching behaviour of Open Access user may be one of the best ways to solve this problem.This thesis is organized as follows. In Chapter One, research both at home and abroad related to this thesis is analyzed, and the result indicates that there is no research about information searching behaviour of Open Access user. So a thorough study about information searching behaviour of Open Access user is proposed due to its theoretical and practical value. Chapter Two introduces three theories, berrypikcing theory, information foraging theory and Wilson’s information searching behaviour model, which are closely related to information searching behaviour of Open Access user. Chapter Three introduces the Web log analysis which is used as the main research method of this thesis. For the method, the conception, data format, processes, tools, advantages and disadvantages are discussed in details. Chapter Four is the main part of this thesis. Firstly, we take "Sciencepaper Online" as an example and collect Web log data from its Web server. Secondly, based on the preprocessed data, we explore information retrieval behaviour and information browsing behaviour of Open Access user. Chapter Five summarizes our main conclusions:Open Access users are from regions with a large number of universities; cycles are found in users’ visit time by hour of day and by day of week; search engines are the users’ favorite referring sites among which Google is the top one; users from different types of referring sites have various visiting characteristics; Open Access users prefer the home page of Open Access repository as their entry page; the depth of most visits is less than 2 pages; the average stay length of every page is 34 seconds; both similarities and differences are found between characteristics of mobile terminal users and other users; Open Access users would choose quick search rather than advanced search; Open Access users seldom use combinations of different main retrieval fields nor change the default values of aid retrieval fields.There are three innovations in this thesis. Firstly, it is a comprehensive analysis on information searching behaivour of Open Access user. Secondly, we investigate information searching behaivour of users who visit the Open Access repositories by mobile terminals. Finally, some implications and suggestions to Open Access repositories are brought out.