Information in Transition : Examining the Information Behaviour of Academics as they Transition into University Careers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transitions are often times of upheaval. A transition, even when<br/>positive, may be disruptive as familiar contexts, supports, and resources change.<br/>While early career academics are highly trained and experienced, the transition<br/>from doctoral student to academic involves a series of new roles and<br/>responsibilities within a new information environment, an environment that has<br/>been influenced by neoliberal ideals and become increasingly corporatised and<br/>managerial in nature. Within information behaviour research there has been a<br/>lack of research that focuses specifically on periods of transition, particularly<br/>on individuals in transition over time. Additionally, while there is information<br/>behaviour research on academics, it does not address the experiences of<br/>academics as they start their careers. This research addresses those gaps.<br/><br/>This research used constructivist grounded theory and critical discourse<br/>analysis as methodologies to explore the information behaviour of 20<br/>individuals transitioning from doctoral students to academics in Australia and<br/>Canada. Academics in the humanities and social sciences, who had recently<br/>moved from full-time doctoral studies to full-time academic positions, were<br/>followed for a period of between five and seven months. To triangulate the data,<br/>three data sources were used: two in-depth interviews, multiple check-ins, and<br/>documents. Interviews were analysed using grounded theory analysis,<br/>documents using critical discourse analysis. Two theoretical frameworks were<br/>used to provide analytical lenses: neoliberalism and Transitions Theory. Several<br/>major themes emerged from this research that contribute to both information<br/>behaviour research and Transitions Theory.<br/><br/>In looking at academics’ work, the number and variety of administrative<br/>and managerial tasks universities require academics to perform greatly<br/>increases their information needs. Administrative work becomes a layer over all<br/>academic work. However, universities frequently fail to provide the information<br/>academics require, leaving information needs unfulfilled. Because of this, early<br/>career academics frequently seek information from their more senior colleagues,<br/>rather than relying on textual sources. Senior colleagues provide timely,<br/>convenient, and comprehensive information. Physical proximity and the<br/>building of collegial relationships promote information sharing, informal<br/>information exchanges, and serendipitous information finding that is of great<br/>use to early career academics. Social information is instrumental for early<br/>career academics’ settling in to their new positions, as doctoral studies often fail<br/>to provide an accurate picture of academic life or to fully prepare students for<br/>research, teaching, service, and administrative roles. Comparing and contrasting<br/>previous experiences to their current experience is one way that early career<br/>academics use new information to learn new ways of working and develop a<br/>sense of belonging in academia. From these findings, the theory of Systemic<br/>Managerial Constraints (SMC) emerged. SMC views the managerialism that<br/>results from neoliberalism within universities as pervasive and constraining<br/>both what work early career academics do and how they do it. However,<br/>colleagues help to ameliorate the effects of SMC and early career academics<br/>learn, as they transition, to enact their personal agency to enable them to do the<br/>work that they value.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it