Investigating genre-credibility relations in the context of scholars' information practices

• Authors: Min-Chun Ku
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
• Year: 2011

This study seeks to investigate the relationships between genres and credibility in the context of scholars' information practices. The author will explore how scholars in different disciplines predict, perceive, and assess the credibility of the genres that they seek and use in their research and teaching tasks in different academic contexts. Whether or not there are relationships, and/or what relationships exist between different types and different levels of complexity of tasks and genres that are sought, used, and cited in different academic settings will also be examined. Scholars from different disciplines will be recruited to participate in this research. The author will employ citation analysis, interviews, and focus groups to identify each scholar's genre repertoire and his/her research and teaching tasks that initiate and develop their information practices based on his/her publications, syllabi, and other related academic outputs. Card-sorting and repertory grids will then be adopted to understand the differences of the perceived credibility among genres. The interview transcripts will be content analyzed to unfold the relationships between the genres that scholars seek and use and how their credibility is predicted, perceived, and assessed in different tasks in contexts. The findings will identify the relationships between tasks that vary in their types and complexity and the cues that different genres render to credibility prediction and assessment in various academic situations. The results of this study will provide a conceptual foundation of human-information interaction that can be applied to different population in different contexts and inform the design of information systems and services in practices.