Serving our academic community expects us to understand the researchers, their professional lives, motivation, needs, workloads, work organization, partnerships, etc. – maximum information that stand behind their work. A lot is identified just by serving the academic community.
In order to step ahead to identify future development in research support, the stories and expectations behind the work of researchers were sought. A deep interview survey was conducted among researchers at our university from various research fields in engineering, age groups, and professional experience. Due to expected differences in information needs between users in academic and industrial environments, also a brief insight into the information support in industry was taken.
As a conclusion, the survey revealed that researchers rely highly on their own know-how, experience and skills. Several aspects play key role in their information and publishing behavior, e.g. the nature of the research (basic vs. applied), the extent of cooperation with industry, the aim of the activities (teaching vs. research), and scientific prestige and rate of financial dependence on the income from the research.
Overall, researchers have their own ways, tools and social ties to obtain information, and have little motivation to learn new things. They cope with the principle of least effort, they prefer quality over quantity, the speed and availability of information. The survey has shown that the overall information behavior in engineering has not changed much compared to the literature of the 1970s.
This paper will describe the particular detailed findings in the area of information and publishing behavior of engineers in academic environment and their attitude towards current aspects of scholarly communication incl. Open Access and social networking.
The work was conducted for a dissertation at the Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, defended in 2016.
