The information seeking behaviour of engineers and scientists

What is it about?

This article examines the information seeking behaviour of engineers and scientists in a workplace environment. It seeks to explain how they search for information, and what use they make of Google and more formal search tools.

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Why is it important?

This article considers findings from recent Master’s research exploring the information-seeking behaviours of engineers and scientists in the workplace. The objectives of this research were to establish where engineers and scientists look for information, consider their search preferences and determine the understanding they have of online search engine operation. There is limited current research in these areas looking at engineers and scientists in the workplace. The research used surveys and interviews to gather data. This research showed both similarities and differences between engineers’ and scientists’ information-seeking behaviours. The most popular resources used by both engineers and scientists were online search engines, specialist databases and scholar search engines; and the most used sources were from within their own organisation (colleagues and documents). Electronic versions of sources were preferred over print because of their searchability. It is suggested that there are significant gaps in the understanding of search engine functionality by both engineers and scientists, even though it is the most heavily used resource for information seeking. Whilst this research does not make generalisations about the wider engineer and scientist populations, potential implications for information professionals working with these groups are considered.

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