Open AccessInformation needs and search characteristics of first‐year medical students
Author(s) -
Saparova Dinara
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.14504901232
Subject(s) - information needs , variety (cybernetics) , computer science , online search , subject (documents) , process (computing) , information retrieval , information seeking , medical information , data science , psychology , medical education , world wide web , artificial intelligence , medicine , operating system
This study aimed to investigate the relationships between information needs of first‐year medical students and search strategies they used to address those needs during online information searching. Students' information needs focused around two categories of questions – general medical and diagnostic – and were pursued through a variety of online searches. Searches for general medical knowledge aimed to find information that was known to exist and resulted in the known‐item search tasks. Searches for diagnostic knowledge required finding several pieces of information that needed to be put together to answer a question and resulted in subject search tasks. Remote observations demonstrated that students' searches for general medical information were short, quick, and did not require investment of a significant time or cognitive effort. Diagnostic searches, in contrast, consisted of multiple search moves, were time‐consuming, and required a lot more thinking. Students performed both types of searches in indexed medical databases and Google but used them differently. Students' search patterns were visualized. Such way of presenting the findings allowed for a quick overview of the observed search process characteristics.