Making functional units functional: The role of rhetorical structure in use of scholarly journal articles

  • Authors:

  • Lei Zhang;Rick Kopak;Luanne Freund;Edie Rasmussen

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1;School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1;School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1;School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Information Management: The Journal for Information Professionals
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Scholars are reading more journal articles than ever, so it is important that they focus on the relevant text within the articles they read. To support this goal, this study explores enhancements to a journal reading system by applying the idea of the functional unit, the smallest information unit with a distinct function within four major components of scholarly journal articles-Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. This study examined a set of functional units and their associations with scholarly journal article use tasks through literature analysis and validation surveys. Forty-one typical functional units were found in psychology journal articles, with varying relevance to five tasks requiring use of information in journal articles. The relationships among sets of functional units for particular tasks were also identified. A taxonomy was developed incorporating the relationships between functional units and information use tasks, which can be used to inform system design. Based on this taxonomy, a prototype journal reading environment signalling functional units was designed and implemented for testing.