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Identifying structural genre conventions across academic web documents for information use
Author(s) -
Ma Cui–Chang,
Cao Shu–Jin
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401029
Subject(s) - computer science , world wide web , taxonomy (biology) , encyclopedia , information retrieval , citation , domain (mathematical analysis) , hierarchy , library science , mathematical analysis , botany , mathematics , economics , market economy , biology
The organization and presentation of academic documents on the web are mostly on the documental level. However, what the researchers need is always the particular information pieces of documents rather than the whole. Genre provides us with an expected form and content from both authors and readers; therefore, functional analysis of genre might be employed to decompose web documents into information units for information use. In this vein, this study aims to build the taxonomy of information units within academic web documents for information use based on structural genre theory. The genres chosen include abstract from online bibliography, research article from open access journal, entry of online encyclopedia and academic weblog post. Two sequential studies are conducted. In the first study, the taxonomy with the hierarchy of genre – component – functional unit is firstly built by identification of information units within academic web document genres, and then is validated and refined through corpus in the domain of citation analysis in Chinese. In the second study, user survey is conducted to validate the information units in the taxonomy. The results suggest that the knowledge of social convention of academic web genres in the taxonomy in domain of citation analysis in Chinese is well identified, which can inform the design of search engine to support effective and efficient web information use for academic purposes.