scholars are scholarly products that that bring together specialized source material, tools and expertise to support inquiry in a specific research area (Palmer, 2004, 2005).

Reading
The act of reading is a highly ubiquitous information activity that has rarely been the direct object of study in information behavior research. Thus, surprisingly little is known about the variable and complex reading processes involved in research and scholarship. Aspects of scholarly reading have been reported as part of more general studies of document or e-journal use, with the primitives of scanning, assessing, and rereading emerging in the literature. When information is first encountered, it is scanned in some preliminary way, as when a scholar reviews bibliographic fields while searching the online catalog or segments of pages when flipping through of a volume in a library. Each source is assessed to determine its relevance to the information problem at hand or to a longer term information need, and these interactions differ based on the kind of source and the researcher’s intentions and mode of inquiry. Other reading processes come into play when information is read more thoroughly or kept and reread later or over time.

General reading patterns related to e-journal use have been systematically documented in longitudinal surveys conducted by Tenopir and colleagues, showing differences among disciplines and important changes over time (eg, Tenopir, 2003; Tenopir et al., 2003; Tenopir et al., 2005; Tenopir & King, 2008). Not surprisingly, e-journal use has become the norm in the sciences and mathematics, where the format has been widely available for some time and readily adopted. Strong levels of use have also been documented in business and economics, but history, education and the arts have made a slower transition, due at least in part to lower levels of e-journal availability in disciplines outside the sciences (Education for Change, 2002). Such e-resource trends are suggestive, but they are not direct measures of actual reading activities.

Scanning
Researchers often begin working with documents by scanning them prior to engaging in more thorough reading. This practice has always been common with print materials, and it is accelerating and becoming more dynamic in the digital environment. For example, studies have demonstrated that scientists and engineers tend to skim papers to identify key components, beginning with the abstract, then moving to section headings, lists, summary statements, definitions and illustrations (Schatz et al., 1999). This process has extended to digital documents, where search features make it easier to pinpoint segments for reading, such as descriptions of experimental techniques or application of theories (Bishop, 1999). In particular, more recent large-scale transaction log studies have suggested that scholars are making greater use of abstracts in full-text databases (Nicholas, Huntington, & Jamali, 2007). Analysis of ScienceDirect logs showed that social scientists conducted the highest proportion of abstract-only sessions (41%), followed by mathematicians (40%), computer scientists (35%) economists (33%), life scientists (13%), engineers (13%), and chemists (12%). Supplementary surveys of users clarified that, while abstracts were valued for quick access and downloading, they did not substitute for reading the full article. Other studies have further confirmed that scholars often begin with preliminary parts of a document and then skim the full-text before printing for later reading (Tenopir et al., 2005).

The results from recent studies could be interpreted as evidence that scholars are reading more than in the past. For example, the number of articles read by university medical faculty was over 30% higher in 2006 than in the mid-1990s. At the same time, reading time per article fell, with medical scholars averaging about 24 minutes per article (Tenopir, 2006). However, while scholars are spending less time with more papers, they are also increasingly working through information on the Web by rapidly scanning material, or

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