Information Research, Vol. 10 No. 1, 2004

Information-seeking behaviour: the case of specialists, residents, and interns at hospitals of Ahvaz University of Medical Sciences.

Zahed Bigdeli

Department of Library and Information Science
School of Education and Psychology
Shahid Chamran University
Ahvaz, Iran
E-mail: bigdeli_zahed@yahoo.co.in

This study attempts to investigate the information-seeking behavior of specialists, residents, and interns at the hospitals of Ahvaz University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The data were collected through a questionnaire completed by 114 respondents. The findings of the research revealed that the three groups used informal channels (e.g., colleagues, conferences, etc.) in order to obtain specific as well as general information to keep abreast with progress in medicine. Specialists, residents, and interns reported significantly different information-seeking behaviors, and their experiences varied significantly. Specialists were significantly different from residents and interns.

The study also showed that proficiency in English is moderately related to success in obtaining information from secondary sources in English. Further, 69% of specialists, 46% of residents, and 53% of interns reported their up-to-datedness with progress in medical sciences as "average". Personal problems in keeping abreast with progress in medicine were related to time constrain and lack of familiarity with using information sources. Moreover, for all the three groups, organizational or non-personal problems involved poor quality of collections and inadequate number of books as well as their out-of-datedness.