Research scholar’s interaction with online information resources in their academic activities: A survey

The paper aims to study the perception of research scholars on importance of online information resources for accomplishing their academic tasks. In this study, questionnaire method was used for data collection. A total 120 questionnaires were distributed to the research scholars of twenty one departments at University of Mysore and 115 filled-in questionnaires were received back with overall response rate of 95.83%. The study findings indicates that the research scholars depend on numerous online resources for fulfil their various academic tasks. For example ‘Community-based encyclopedias such as Wikipedia used for looking definition of concept, the ‘University Library Web OPAC’ for looking required books, ‘University library-subscribed databases such as ‘Web of Science’ and ‘SciFinder’ for looking articles, ‘Face-to-face reference services’ for looking answer to some specific questions. Search engines are the most commonly used source for accomplishing task of preparing ‘Research papers’. However, the online resources ‘Social Network Sites’ like Facebook’ are very less important sources for performing both academic tasks of the research scholars. Even though, the use of online information resources have been increased, the traditional resources still play significant role than some other popular new online resources for performing the some specific tasks. The majority of respondents opined that the relevance of information is major criteria for seeking the information on the web