Empirical studies of collaborative information seeking: a review of methodological issues
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2018-0072 |
| Date | 14 January 2019 |
| Published date | 14 January 2019 |
| Pages | 140-163 |
| Author | Morten Hertzum,Preben Hansen |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Empirical studies of collaborative
information seeking: a review of
methodological issues
Morten Hertzum
Department of Information Studies, University of Copenhagen,
Copenhagen, Denmark, and
Preben Hansen
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences,
Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden
Abstract
Purpose –Information seeking is often performed in collaborative contexts. The research into such
collaborative information seeking (CIS) has been proceeding since the 1990s but lacks methodological
discussions. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss methodologicalissues in existing CIS studies.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors systematically review 69 empirical CIS studies.
Findings –The review shows that the most common methods of data collection are lab experiments
(43 percent), observation (19 percent) and surveys (16 percent), that the most common methods of data
analysis are description (33 percent), statistical testing (29 percent) and content analysis (19 percent) and that
CIS studies involve a fairly even mix of novice, intermediate and specialist participants. However, the authors
also find that CIS research is dominated by exploratory studies, leaves it largely unexplored in what waysthe
findings of a study may be specific to the particular study setting, appears to assign primacy to precision at
the expense of generalizability, struggles with investigating how CIS activities extend over time and provides
data about behavior to a larger extent than about reasons, experiences and especially outcomes.
Research limitations/implications –The major implication of this review is its identification of the need
for a shared model to which individual CIS studies can contribute in a cumulative manner. To support the
development of such a model, the authors discuss a model of the core CIS process and a model of the factors
that trigger CIS.
Originality/value –This study assesses the current state of CIS research, provides guidance for future CIS
studies and aims to inspire further methodological discussion.
Keywords Research methods, Information science, Information seeking, Information behaviour,
Collaborative information seeking, Collaborative search
Paper type Literature review
1. Introduction
Information seeking is integral to many collaborative activities. Teams of professionals seek
and interact with information in engineering (Poltrock et al., 2003), government (Hansen and
Järvelin, 2005), healthcare (Reddy and Jansen, 2008), research (Farooq et al., 2009) and
various other work contexts. Similarly, people may seek information collaboratively in
leisure situations (Amershi and Morris, 2008), when they attend school (Knight and Mercer,
2015) and so forth. The research area of collaborative information seeking (CIS) has emerged
around these activities and established a research base that evolves around empirical
studies. Yet, CIS research lacks methodological discussions, partly because the foci of
different CIS studies have called for the use of a variety of methods. This study reviews
methodological issues in empirical CIS studies to assess the current state of CIS research,
provide guidance for future CIS studies and inspire further methodological discussion.
CIS phenomena present many open questions. For example, some CIS studies aim to
unravel what activities people engagein to seek information collaboratively and competently
in real-life situations, while other studies aim to create and evaluate technologies to support
people in their collaborative search for information. As a consequence, CIS research involves
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 75 No. 1, 2019
pp. 140-163
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2018-0072
Received 10 May 2018
Revised 30 August 2018
Accepted 3 September 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
140
JD
75,1
and embeds research from several other research areas, such as computer-supported
cooperative work,human-computer interaction, information seeking (interactive) information
retrieval, library and informationscience and social media. In this study we takeCIS to imply
a focus on the psychological, social and possibly organizational aspects of how people seek
information collaboratively. Thisway we, for example, exclude studies that are purely about
the algorithmic aspects of CIS technologies, purely about individual information seeking and
purely about information sharing. But the studies included in our review may of course
contain elements of, say, information sharing as part of their treatment of CIS phenomena.
This review concerns the methods used in CIS studies. Methodological issues are
important because they frame what studies are about and what can, and cannot, be
concluded from them. To the best of our knowledge the only previous discussion of
methodsinCISstudiesisHyldegårdet al. (2015). However, they merely discussed the
methods of three CIS studies. In this paper we analyze and discuss methodological issues
in 69 CIS studies following a systematic review approach. We review these CIS studies
with respect to their level of investigation, methods of data collection, groups of
participants, types of data collected and methods of data analysis. Figure 1 illustrates the
ten classifications that enter into our coding scheme and form the basis of our analysis
and discussion. With the increasing number of CIS studies it has become pertinent to
transition from exploratory toward more focused studies to advance CIS research. Such a
transition is to a large extent methodological. We hope this review will support the CIS
community in maki ng this transition .
In the following we first define the CIS concept to provide a background for the review.
Then we describe our systematic review method, including its inclusion and exclusion
criteria, and present the review results. Finally, we discuss patterns in the results and
implications for future CIS studies.
2. Background
Research on the collaborative aspects of information seeking is relatively young.
Many of the influential models of information seeking still portray it as an
activity performed by individual information seekers (e.g. Case and Given, 2016;
Kuhlthau, 2004; Wilson, 1999). CIS research focuses on how groups of people
perform activities such as realizing their information needs, preparing for the search
activity, collecting information, making sense of it, sharing resulting insights and using
the information in their work and leisure activities. A better understanding of CIS
CIS studies
People
CIS system
Task
Data collection
Participant type
Participant experience
Participant count
Level of investigation
Hypotheses?
Comparative?
Data analysis
Data types
Purpose
Figure 1.
CIS studies encircled
by the ten
classifications
employed in this
review
141
Empirical
studies of CIS
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