Celebrating Faculty Excellence
The faculty of the School of Information Sciences is committed to conducting basic and applied research that promotes the generation of new knowledge, services, and technology. The School also encourages research that strengthens its instructional and public service programs.
The research our faculty conduct goes beyond impacting the field; from learning about how information access affects rural communities to better understanding how disinformation spreads, and the role of AI in information sciences research and practice, their research touches the lives of people around the state, country, and world. Our faculty’s scholarship and research matters, and they continue to be global leaders in the field.”
Abebe Rorissa
Professor and Director of the School of Information Sciences
Research
Please note that some articles, books, and other published works may require a subscription. Students and UT employees interested in reading a published piece can seek access through the UT Libraries website, lib.utk.edu.
The pandemic and changes in early career researchers’ career prospects, research and publishing practices
Professor Suzie Allard
In this Plos One journal article, Allard and co-authors aimed to discover the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on junior researchers’ work-life, career prospects, research and publishing practices and networking. Results showed the impact of the pandemic on career prospects, morale, job security, productivity, ability to network and collaborate, and quality and speed of peer review has on the whole been more negative than positive. Although, generally, the pandemic negatively impacted many aspects of ECRs’ work-life, certain research areas and individuals benefited from being more appreciated and valued, and, in some cases, resulted in increased resources, better productivity and greater impact. Changes, such as the use of digital technologies and remote working created new opportunities for some ECRs.
Diversity Fatigue: Acknowledging and Moving Beyond Repetitious Emotional Labor
Assistant Professor of Practice Joy Marie Doan
In this book chapter, Doan and co-author explore diversity fatigue—the strenuous work needed to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and how it affects Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in Library and Information Sciences (LIS). While there is a heightened amount of pressure to enhance DEI initiatives in LIS, there is conversely an increased burden placed on BIPOC employees to advocate for and initiate such projects. This results in these employees being pulled into conversations, projects, and initiatives that ultimately culminate in an added expenditure of energy not experienced by their non-BIPOC counterparts. Diversity fatigue negatively influences the work experiences of BIPOC library personnel and may result in several negative outcomes for the organization. The authors address how the expectations surrounding DEI work by BIPOC personnel in these spaces have negative repercussions on these individuals’ morale, wellness, and professional growth.
Peer Influence in the Adoption of Video Games
Assistant Professor Jiangen He
In this International Journal of E-Business Research journal article, He and co-authors investigate how peer influence affects customers’ product adoption behaviors in emerging video game platforms. Understanding peer influence is critical to motivating users’ willingness to purchase and improving game publishers’ marketing performance. While similarities between socially linked users can be viewed as a consequence of social influence, homophily may also contribute to such phenomenon, causing identification difficulties in observational studies. Using data from the world’s largest digital distribution platform for video games, the authors leverage state-of-the-art recommender system algorithms and propose an innovative framework to identify social influence in the adoption of video games when a confounding homophily effect is present. The results show that peer influence has a positive impact on platform users’ adoption behaviors. This study also finds that peer influence would have been overestimated if homophily was not properly controlled.
Proposing an information value chain to improve information services to disabled library patrons using assistive technologies
Professor Devendra Potnis
In this Journal of Information Science article, Potnis and co-author explore how Information services offered by academic libraries increasingly rely on assistive technologies (AT) to facilitate disabled patrons’ retrieval and use of information for learning and teaching. However, disabled patrons’ access to AT might not always lead to their use, resulting in the underutilization of information services offered by academic libraries. We adopt an inward-looking, service innovation perspective to improve information services for disabled patrons using AT. The open coding of qualitative responses collected from administrators and librarians in 186 academic libraries in public universities in the United States, reveals 10 mechanisms, which involve searching, compiling, mixing, framing, sharing, or reusing information, and learning from it. Based on this information-centric reorganization of work practices, they propose an “information value chain,” for improving information services to disabled patrons using AT in academic libraries.
