Expecting the Unexpected: Serendipity, Discovery, and the Scholarly Research Process

When considering researcher needs around scholarly information seeking and retrieval, the academic information industry often focuses on search—whether that’s publishers indexing with a wide variety of search engines or libraries bringing Google—like search boxes to campus resources. Indeed, so much effort has been spent optimizing information systems for search that many providers consider searching for known information a solved problem. But even if that is the case, what happens when an information system is presented with a vague, fuzzy, or even unspoken information need, when users do not quite know what they’re looking for? We set out to explore this question through interviews and surveys of students, researchers, and instructors across the globe about their habits and preferences with content recommendations and other chance encounters with scholarly materials relevant to their work. We then examined the information behavior literature to better understand these responses in a wider context. Finally, we looked at what solutions were already out there and asked technologists and other publishers how information providers might support these unspoken, unplanned, and often unexamined methods of discovery, which, in this paper, we refer to as serendipity.

We found that there is a spectrum of discussion in the information studies literature: at one end, accidental discovery of unknown information is seen as a fundamental method of scholarly information seeking (Cooksey, 2004); at the other end, chance information encounters are rejected as having a useful role to play in academic practices at all (Gup, 1998). The purpose of this paper is not to take a position on that debate but to share some of what Sage has learned about the dynamics of unplanned discovery and how information professionals can encourage this type of unplanned discovery to drive better research outcomes.