Abstract

Today, despite the increase in professional knowledge-related information needs of citizens, the expansion of citizen participatory research in academia, and the provision of information services for the professional knowledge, there are still difficulties in access to scholarly information resources by laypeople. Focusing on this problem, this study investigates laypeople’s scholarly information needs and behaviors through a questionnaire survey. By examining the search and use behaviors of scholarly information resources, and the perception of the need to support the utilization of them, this study analyzes the degree and pattern of social sharing of scholarly information resources beyond the scholarly community. This study is significant in that it expands the range of users in traditional scholarly communication and emphasizes the need to support them to access and use scholarly information resources.