Research On The Academic Social Network Users' Information Seeking Behavior

The academic social network has developed rapidly and received extensive attention from scholars.Current research on academic social networks focuses on network platforms,academic social network user structures,academic social network user behavior,personalized recommendations,alternative metrology,and more.Among them,the most popular research direction is users behaviors,including user behavior motives,behavior types,influencing factors,etc.,but there is little involvement in information seeking behavior.This provides a research perspective for this article.Previous research has found that discover peer is an important behavior for users to use academic social networks.Therefore,based on this motivation,the aim of this study is to understand the behavior of users seekinging for peers on academic social networks.Based on the research purpose,this study combs the research status of academic social network,summarizes the relevant theories of academic social network and information seeking behavior,selects the representative academic social network platform,ResearchGate,as the research platform,and recruits users of the platform for controlled experiments to record and analyze the user's search behavior.This study will answer three research questions:(1)What is the seeking pathway when users seeking peers on the academic social network platform?(2)What are the strategies and characteristics of the user information seeking behaviors on the academic social network platform?(3)What factors influence the user information seeking behaviors?The specific research contents of this paper are as follows:The first chapter mainly introduces the research background,reviews the research progress of academic social networks,and puts forward the research purpose,research content and research methods of this paper,and states the research innovation points.The second chapter mainly reviews the related concept theories involved in this research.Firstly,it introduces the definition and platform of academic social network.Secondly,it summarizes the definition and strategic framework of information seeking behavior,defines peer information seeking behavior,and summarizes the current theory of information seeking behavior in social network environment.Finally,a brief introduction to character search.The third chapter mainly analyzes the seeking pathway when academic socialnetwork users seeking for peers.In this chapter,we first introduce the research methods,namely user-controlled experiments and questionnaires and interviews,and then construct a user information seeking pathway analysis framework,and extract experiments data according to the framework.Finally,Data is analyzed based on page features,page transition features and pathway.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the academic social network users seeking strategies.This chapter firstly constructs the information seeking strategy framework based on previous studies,which is divided into two dimensions: method and resource.And then it analyzes the methods and resources that users choose and use when seeking for peers,sums up the sub-strategy,and through cluster analysis,summarizes and describes the strategy types.The fifth chapter mainly analyzes the influencing factors of users' information peer seeking behaviors.The factors include user characteristics,user experience,user seeking scholar experience and task characteristics.There are two aspects of user information seeking behavior,seeking pathway and seeking strategy.The sixth chapter mainly discusses the research results,analyzes habits of users' information seeking behavior,including the needs,the seeking methods,the effect of social networks on seeking behavior,the basis of selecting peers and satisfaction,and finally put forward some suggastions to improve the seeking efficiency.The last chapter mainly summarizes the research of this paper,including the conclusions and shortcomings of this paper,as well as the prospects for future research work.