Information Seeking in Context: Results of Graduate Student Interviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We conducted a qualitative research study examining the information seeking behaviours of Psychology, Sociology and Women’s Studies graduate students at a large research intensive university to determine how graduate students find information; the roles that faculty members, fellow graduate students and librarians play in the information search; and graduate students’ knowledge of information resources and services. The context of graduate student information seeking was uncovered through an analysis of the data using the trichotomy of people, place and information. Across the disciplines, Master’s students were more likely to ask for librarian assistance than PhD students. The interview findings will be used to improve librarian support to this user group via an instruction plan aimed at those graduate students most in need of librarian assistance: Master’s students. We recommend a series of several (e.g., approximately four to eight) strategically timed brief (e.g., ten-minute) sessions offered via a first-year mandatory research methods course. Sessions would introduce students to key resources, explain the role librarians can play in their research and advertise the office hours service. This enhanced librarian support will ensure that all new graduate students have a common information seeking knowledge base and that they understand the services offered by their liaison librarians. Most importantly, it places librarians in close proximity to graduate students providing opportunities to uncover and address their actual research needs. Future research will look at the effectiveness of this plan in supporting graduate students with their research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".