A Review of Research Methodologies Employed in Serendipity Studies in the Context of Information Research

Background: The concept of serendipity has become increasingly interesting for those undertaking serendipity research in recent years. However, serendipitous encounters are subjective and rare in a real-world context, making this an extremely challenging subject to study. Methods: Various methods have been proposed to enable researchers to understand and measure serendipity, but there is no broad consensus on which methods to use in different experimental settings. A comprehensive literature review was first conducted, which summarizes the research methods being employed to study serendipity. It was followed by a series of interviews with experts that specified the relative strengths and weaknesses of each method identified in the literature review, in addition to the challenges usually confronted in serendipity research. Results: The findings suggest using mixed research methods to produce a more complete picture of serendipity and contribute to the verification of any research findings. Several challenges and implications relating to empirical studies in the investigation of serendipity have been derived from this study. Conclusions: This paper investigated research methods employed to study serendipity by synthesizing finding from a literature review and the interviews with experts. It provides a methodological contribution to serendipity studies by systematically summarizing the methods employed in the studies of serendipity and identifying the strengths and weakness of each method. It also suggests the novel approach of using mixed research methods to study serendipity. This study has potential limitations related to a small number of experts involved in the expert interview. However, it should be noted that the nature of the topic is a relatively focused area, and it was observed after interviewing the experts that new data seems to not contribute to the findings owing to its repetition of comment

Reporting serendipity in biomedical research literature : a mixed-methods analysis

As serendipity is an unexpected, anomalous, or inconsistent observation that culminates in a valuable, positive outcome (McCay-Peet & Toms, 2018, pp. 4–6), it can be inferred that effectively supporting serendipity will result in a greater incidence of the desired positive outcomes (McCay-Peet & Toms, 2018, p. 22). In order to effectively support serendipity, however, we must first understand the overall process or experience of serendipity and the factors influencing its attainment. Currently, our understanding and models of the serendipitous experience are based almost exclusively on example collections, compilations of examples of serendipity that authors and researchers have collected as they encounter them (Gries, 2009, p. 9). Unfortunately, reliance on such collections can lead to an over-representation of more vivid and dramatic examples and possible underrepresentation of more common, but less noticeable, exemplars. By applying the principles of corpus research, which involves electronic compilation of examples in existing documents, we can alleviate this problem and obtain a more balanced and representative understanding of serendipitous experiences (Gries, 2009). This three-article dissertation describes the phenomenon of serendipity, as it is recorded in biomedical research articles indexed in the PubMed Central database, in a way that might inform the development of machine compilation systems for the support of serendipity. Within this study, serendipity is generally defined as a process or experience that begins with encountering some type of information. That information is subsequently analyzed and further pursued by an individual with related knowledge, skills, and understanding, and, finally, allows them to realize a valuable outcome. The information encounter that initiates the serendipity experience exhibits qualities of unexpectedness as well as value for the user. In this mixed method study, qualitative content analysis, supported by natural language processing, and concurrent with statistical analysis, is applied to gain a robust understanding of the phenomenon of serendipity that may reveal features of serendipitous experience useful to the development of recommender system algorithms.Includes bibliographical reference

Down the rabbit hole: Investigating disruption of the information encountering process

Information encountering (IE) often occurs during active information-seeking and involves passively finding unsought, unexpected information that is subjectively considered interesting, useful or potentially useful. While the idealized IE process involves engaging with information after noticing it (e.g. by examining it, conducting follow-up seeking to determine usefulness, then using or sharing it), the process can be disrupted -resulting in missed opportunities for knowledge and insight creation. This study provides a detailed understanding of when and why the process can be disrupted. Think-aloud observations and Critical Incident Interviews were conducted with fifteen Web users, focusing on examining when they encountered information but did not engage with it. Factors that discouraged engagement and simultaneously encouraged participants to return to active, goal-directed information-seeking by disrupting the IE process were identified. These factors individually and collectively demonstrate IE can instigate a highly uncertain cost-benefit trade-off, sometimes resulting in encounterers being cautious by returning to ‘less risky’ active seeking. Design suggestions are made for reducing the uncertainty of deciding whether to engage with encountered information and making it easier to return to the active seeking task if disruption occurs

Detecting and characterizing lateral phishing at scale

We present the first large-scale characterization of lateral phishing attacks, based on a dataset of 113 million employee-sent emails from 92 enterprise organizations. In a lateral phishing attack, adversaries leverage a compromised enterprise account to send phishing emails to other users, benefit-ting from both the implicit trust and the information in the hijacked user's account. We develop a classifier that finds hundreds of real-world lateral phishing emails, while generating under four false positives per every one-million employee-sent emails. Drawing on the attacks we detect, as well as a corpus of user-reported incidents, we quantify the scale of lateral phishing, identify several thematic content and recipient targeting strategies that attackers follow, illuminate two types of sophisticated behaviors that attackers exhibit, and estimate the success rate of these attacks. Collectively, these results expand our mental models of the 'enterprise attacker' and shed light on the current state of enterprise phishing attacks

Information behaviour videos on YouTube: an exploratory content analysis, case study of INFIDEOS, and call to action

How do landmark concepts of information behaviour appear as videos on YouTube? What do these multimedia artifacts, altogether, suggest about the information behaviour specialty? What might ideal versions of such videos be like? To create an empirical starting point for answering these timely questions, an exploratory content analysis was performed on a sample of 20 educational videos found on YouTube, focusing upon three big ideas of information behaviour: the Information Search Process (Kuhlthau, 1991), Sense-Making (Dervin, 1983) and Berrypicking (Bates, 1989). A coding frame was created with 23 categories and associated subcategories. SurveyMonkey was used to capture, tabulate and present the data. Due to space limitations, not all categories are included in the findings, which are reported as themes with commentary. YouTube’s information behaviour offerings are: cluttered by look-alike videos; uneven in coverage; dominated by librarians and students; and short on scholarly authority. Though singular, featured concepts can be treated thoroughly, most videos have a narrow focus; no scholarly apparatus; and disregard information behaviour’s legacy and culture. Following the content analysis, the author’s YouTube channel of Information Science videos, INFIDEOS, is profiled with attention to its information behaviour resources. Throughout, general video-making strategies are provided.Peer Reviewe

Characterizing and Evaluating Users' Information Seeking Behavior in Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems in the Web 2.0 era present an innovative information seeking environment succeeding the library and traditional Web. The primary goals of this study were to, in this particular context: (1) identify the general information seeking strategies adopted by users and determine their effectiveness; (2) reveals the characteristics of the users who prefer different strategies; and (3) identify the specific traits of users' information seeking paths and understand factors shaping them. A representative social tagging system, Douban (http://www.douban.com/) was chosen as the research setting in order to generate empirical findings.Based on the mixed methods research design, this study consists of a quantitative phase and a qualitative phase. The former firstly involved a clickstream data analysis of 20 million clickstream records requested from Douban at the footprint, movement, and track levels. Limited to studying physical behavior, it was complemented by an online survey which captured Douban users' background information from various aspects. In the subsequent qualitative phase, a focus group gathered a number of experienced Douban users to help interpret the quantitative results.Major findings of this study show that: (1) the general strategies include encountering, browsing by resource, browsing by tag, browsing by user/group, searching, and monitoring by user/group; (2) while browsing by resource is the most popular strategy, browsing by tag is the most effective one; (3) users preferring different strategies do not have significantly different characteristics; and (4) on users' information seeking paths these exist two resource viewing patterns - continuous and sporadic, and two resource collecting patterns - lagged and instant, and they can be attributed to user, task, and system factors.A model was developed to illustrate the strategic and tactic layers of users' information seeking behavior in social tagging systems. It offers a deep insight into the behavioral changes brought about by this new environment as compared to the Web in general. This model can serve as the theoretical base for designing user-oriented information seeking interfaces for social tagging systems so that the general strategies and specific tactics will be accommodated efficiently

Re-examining and re-conceptualising enterprise search and discovery capability: towards a model for the factors and generative mechanisms for search task outcomes.

Many organizations are trying to re-create the Google experience, to find and exploit their own corporate information. However, there is evidence that finding information in the workplace using search engine technology has remained difficult, with socio-technical elements largely neglected in the literature. Explication of the factors and generative mechanisms (ultimate causes) to effective search task outcomes (user satisfaction, search task performance and serendipitous encountering) may provide a first step in making improvements. A transdisciplinary (holistic) lens was applied to Enterprise Search and Discovery capability, combining critical realism and activity theory with complexity theories to one of the worlds largest corporations. Data collection included an in-situ exploratory search experiment with 26 participants, focus groups with 53 participants and interviews with 87 business professionals. Thousands of user feedback comments and search transactions were analysed. Transferability of findings was assessed through interviews with eight industry informants and ten organizations from a range of industries. A wide range of informational needs were identified for search filters, including a need to be intrigued. Search term word co-occurrence algorithms facilitated serendipity to a greater extent than existing methods deployed in the organization surveyed. No association was found between user satisfaction (or self assessed search expertise) with search task performance and overall performance was poor, although most participants had been satisfied with their performance. Eighteen factors were identified that influence search task outcomes ranging from user and task factors, informational and technological artefacts, through to a wide range of organizational norms. Modality Theory (Cybersearch culture, Simplicity and Loss Aversion bias) was developed to explain the study observations. This proposes that at all organizational levels there are tendencies for reductionist (unimodal) mind-sets towards search capability leading to fixes that fail. The factors and mechanisms were identified in other industry organizations suggesting some theory generalizability. This is the first socio-technical analysis of Enterprise Search and Discovery capability. The findings challenge existing orthodoxy, such as the criticality of search literacy (agency) which has been neglected in the practitioner literature in favour of structure. The resulting multifactorial causal model and strategic framework for improvement present opportunities to update existing academic models in the IR, LIS and IS literature, such as the DeLone and McLean model for information system success. There are encouraging signs that Modality Theory may enable a reconfiguration of organizational mind-sets that could transform search task outcomes and ultimately business performance

Small Businesses Encounters with Information Technology

This dissertation advances the concept of IT encountering, defined as the process whereby individuals pay attention, interpret and respond to cues suggesting changes to IT, in ways that appear sensible to them, and it studies IT encountering in the context of small businesses. I review the literatures on organizational IT adoption and IT selection, and conclude that these literatures have relied on assumptions which leave unattended important aspects of the process leading to choice: the adoption literature presupposes the saliency and significance of a focal technology to a decision maker, and the IT selection literature generally assumes that suitable IT alternatives are known to the individual making choices. The reliance on these assumptions has resulted in blind spots, which have in turn led to deficiencies in our conceptualizations. I discuss these blind spots, some historical and methodological reasons behind them, and their theoretical implications (i.e., the perpetuation of the pro-innovation bias, the absence of search from our theories, and the unexplained gaps between competing explanations of IT choice). The IT encountering perspective draws primarily on the behavioural, sensemaking, and mindfulness research traditions. Those foundations inform the empirical study, which was based on a longitudinal qualitative design, and included event-driven interviews with small business owners. The findings of the study uncover crucial aspects of the cognitive work and behavioural responses carried out by business owners during IT encounters. These aspects are composed together into a process model. My findings are consistent with previous work in noting a considerable time lag between awareness and adoption of IT innovations among small businesses, and in highlighting the crucial role of knowledge therein. The findings also differ from prior research on this topic, especially by considering a much wider range of responses and outcomes lying in between adoption and rejection of IT (e.g., tinkering, experimentation, downscaling), and by taking into account the dialectics and temporal limits of effected IT change. This alternative perspective opens up research avenues beyond the context of study, and can also guide research efforts more attuned to the views and needs of such fundamental socioeconomic actors as small businesses