Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Information Seeking Behaviors, Attitudes, And Choices Of Academic Physicists, Ian D. Gordon, Debbie Chaves, Dylanne Dearborn, Shawn Hendrikx, Rebecca Hutchinson, Christopher Popovich, Michael White

Western Libraries Publications

Physicists in academic institutions utilize a variety of resources and strategies to seek, find, and use scholarly information and news. Using a sample of physicists, researchers surveyed 182 students and faculty at seven Canadian university institutions to explore self-perceived success rates, resources consulted, databases used, and use of social media and citation management systems. To complement the survey, 11 follow up interviews/focus groups were completed with participants to further uncover information-seeking behaviors, choices, strategies, and feelings around keeping up to date with information needs. According to survey results, a minority of physicists (15.4%) acknowledged that they were successfully keeping up …

Understanding The Enumerated World: Making Sense Of Data As An Information Source, Kristi Thompson, Elizabeth Hill, Alexandra Cooper

Western Libraries Publications

Chapter in ACRL publication The Data Literacy Cookbook.

This recipe is a guide to preparing an instructional session aimed at postsecondary students in the social or health sciences or related disciplines on locating, evaluating, and using secondary data sources as information resources. Who collects data? Where can you access them? Why are data available on some topics and not others? Why are some statistics available at a detailed level of geography and others only nationally? What are some key limitations of official statistics, and where can information be found to fill in the gaps? This recipe uses these questions to …