A question of quality: The effect of source quality on information seeking by women in IT professions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper presents preliminary results from a study of how women in information technology (IT) professions use a range of information sources in their day‐to‐day work activities. Through a questionnaire survey, the study investigates the effects of Perceived Source Accessibility and Perceived Source Quality on the selection and use of information sources. Thirteen information sources, including the World Wide Web and Web‐based computer‐mediated communication, were identified. Sixty‐seven participants completed the survey. The most frequently used information source is the World Wide Web, followed by mass media, colleagues in the same department, computer‐mediated communication, business professionals and associates, and colleagues in a different group/department. The least used information sources are the internal library, and competitors. For many of the sources, there was a strong relationship between perceived source quality and source usage. This finding runs counter to early, well‐known studies that concluded that scientists and engineers selected sources based only on their accessibility. Surprisingly, the present study did not find a significant relationship between source accessibility and source usage. The implications for research are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".