Legal Research

How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content

How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content

Comparing the changing user behaviour between 2005 and 2008 and its impact on publisher
web site design and function.

By Simon Inger of Simon Inger Consulting and Tracy Gardner of Tracy Gardner Marketing

Abstract

"There have been many studies using web logs that calculate where users of scholarly resources were referred from, but this approach doesn?t indicate where those users started their research, merely the details of the last ?hop? before hitting a content website. This research repeats an earlier study performed in 2005 by Scholarly Information Strategies (for whom the authors were consultants) that actually asks researchers about their preferred start points. The subtle shifts in user preferences provide a valuable insight into user navigation, the features that they find useful in publisher web sites, and he role and effectiveness of library technologies. Readers are more likely to arrive within a journal web site at the article or abstract level than ever before and this has significant implications for publisher web site design. As a consequence some of the features of publisher web sites may become harder to find and, as more functionality transitions to the reader?s preferred starting point, some of the features may also become less relevant to the researcher. The most highly sought-after features of journal web sites are content alerting services, but not personalisation and not search functions. These findings shed light on how publishers should engineer their web sites to meet reader navigational behaviour."

Read the whole report here. (32 page PDF)

The commentary on the roles of librarians in the process are especially significant especially as they emerge at the confluence of libraries, publishers and researchers needs.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on October 06, 2008 (boomark / email).