By: Carole L. Palmer, Lauren C. Teffeau Carrie and Mr. Pirmann for OCLC Research

Introduction
Research libraries exist to support scholarly work. In recent years, the scholarly literature on practices and information use has been growing, and research libraries should be Prospering from this increased base of knowledge. Unfortunately, the profession has no effective means for Systematically monitoring or synthesizing the published results. This review begins to address the problem by reporting on the state of knowledge on scholarly information behavior, focusing on the information activities involved in the research process and how they differ among disciplines. It provides an empirical basis for identifying promising directions and setting priorities for development of digital information services to support and advance scholarship. Preparing this report required the project team to make decisions about what publications to cover, what results to extract, and how to integrate and present the many valuable purpose often incongruous Findings on scholarly information behavior. Across studies there is considerable variation in how the object of study is defined and in how data is collected and analyzed. The variety of approaches is a natural outcome of the increase in number and sophistication of studies in recent decades and the Complexity of the processes under investigation. The challenges of designing and conducting a solid scholarly study of information behavior are many, but they are rarely apparent when reading the published reports.

Scholars and scientists carry out layers of physical and intellectual activity through a complicated mix of mundane and seemingly idiosyncratic tasks that result in a range of immediate and long-term outcomes. It is difficult to collect data that captures these socio-cognitive processes, and interpreting that data in ways that advance our understanding is even more challenging. The value and uses of information, individual items or entire genres-can change over time, at a micro level as Scholars gather, evaluate, analyze, assimilate and write, and at a more macro level as their ideas evolve, projects move forward and careers unfold. In our studies of scholarly information work, we have seen how a highly influential text a scholar can move into a new research project but then become overshadowed in the course of inquiry, with no trace left in the final, tangible scholarly product. On the other hand, we have also seen how scholars will reference materials from a diverse range of subject areas that reaches far beyond what they can readily recall as part of their directory information. These twists, turns, perceptions and practices are part of the intricate constellation of information activities that generate new scholarship and that we Strive to document and understand through empirical studies of scholarly information behavior. The term “information behavior “has become the field’s preferred term for studies of information needs and uses, but here, and in previous related papers, we use the terms “information practices” and “information work” since they we believe they are a better representation of the social aspects of scholarly activities and the purposeful, Workaday nature of how scholars spend their time.

Scope of the Literature
The scholarly literature on information behavior dates back at least to the reports from the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference and the 1952 symposium on Chicago School specialized information (Egan, 1954). Since that time, there has been a stream Increasing Steadily of research that has moved beyond the science to address the range of disciplines. By the 1980s,
user research studies Had taken hold as a significant subfield in DSL, and much of the research on scholarly groups produced over the decades is still highly relevant. For example, in the early digital era, RLG released a series of studies that provided a broad examination of information needs across the humanities, social sciences and sciences. The three reports covered a total of 20 disciplines profiling the kind of information, its uses and sources in each field (Gould, 1988 Gould & Handler 1989, Gould & Pearce, 1991). Around the same time, a book-length study of the work processes of Art historians was published by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University (Bakewell, Beeman, & Reese, 1988). These two contrasting approaches stand as exemplars of the broad and deep analysis needed to understand how to Develop effective information resources and tools for scholars. The results from these and other earlier works still hold implications for contemporary research libraries. In addition to supplying benchmarks from the past for Assessing Consistency and Change Over time, they contain important insights on information work before it was influenced by current technologies. Some information practices have not been altered in any fundamental way in the digital environment, but many may be advanced or enhanced with new information resources and tools. For example, the table below presents a distillation of results from the reports on the RLG types of information sources found to be of importance across the various disciplines studied. What has changed in the digital environment is not the value of these kinds of sources rather how to they are searched, accessed and used in the scholarly process. Therefore, while recent literature is Emphasized in the review, selected earlier studies have been consulted dating back to 1962.

As suggested above, it is complicated to integrate gold make close comparisons among different kinds of studies. Quantitative and qualitative approaches and make separate contributions together Provide complimentary perspectives and results. For example, ethnographic data provide richer and more nuanced analysis of research as it happens, while quantitative surveys produce more general results on patterns and trends in information behavior. In recent years, qualitative studies have become more common and are strongly represented Therefore in this review. Coverage of bibliometric studies is limited, since they tend to tell us more about the structure and flow of information than the actual work practices of scholars. Across studies the groups of scholars and scientists studied have been scoped in different ways, ranging from very broad classes (eg, science, humanities) to more narrowly defined disciplines (eg, Jewish studies, literary criticism, genomics) and mixed groups of interdisciplinary scholars working in many different research areas. Since it was not possible to align and integrate the results by population studied, our approach was to bring
findings together information on scholarly activities, associating studies of similar domains and Providing loose comparisons where possible.

Most of the literature covered is from newspaper publications in library and information science (LIS) and a number of important books and professional reports have also been included. Selected items from cognate fields in the social sciences and other information science domains, such as computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), are also discussed. Other research areas such as human – computer and internet interaction studies have not been included, partly due to space constraints Because their goal also applying to information services is often less direct. Because of our focus on disciplinary practices, we have not included research from LIS or cognate areas that examines Information behavior Primarily from the perspective of the individual. Many such studies have been Demonstrating how important in the local context information influences behavior, Although the definition of context has been applied Debated and Inconsistently (Courtright, 2007; Talja, Keso, & Pietilainen, 1999). Our focus in gathering literature for review was on more socio-cultural approaches that interpret information behavior as practiced within a discipline or field of study. As suggested by Hj

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