Expertise seeking: A review

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Highlights

  • Expertise seeking involves selecting people for consultation about info needs.

  • People, e.g. work-group colleagues, are among the most frequent sources.

  • Seekers balance quality and accessibility in their selection of sources.

  • Source selection is affected by task-related, seeker-related and contextual factors.

  • Multiple barriers complicate, degrade, or prevent expertise seeking.

Abstract

Expertise seeking is the activity of selecting people as sources for consultation about an information need. This review of 72 expertise-seeking papers shows that across a range of tasks and contexts people, in particular work-group colleagues and other strong ties, are among the most frequently used sources. Studies repeatedly show the influence of the social network – of friendships and personal dislikes – on the expertise-seeking network of organisations. In addition, people are no less prominent than documentary sources, in work contexts as well as daily-life contexts. The relative influence of source quality and source accessibility on source selection varies across studies. Overall, expertise seekers appear to aim for sufficient quality, composed of reliability and relevance, while also attending to accessibility, composed of access to the source and access to the source information. Earlier claims that seekers disregard quality to minimise effort receive little support. Source selection is also affected by task-related, seeker-related, and contextual factors. For example, task complexity has been found to increase the use of information sources whereas task importance has been found to amplify the influence of quality on source selection. Finally, the reviewed studies identify a number of barriers to expertise seeking.

Introduction

People seek information from other people. Several studies find that the use of people as sources equals or surpasses that of documentary sources, at least for complex and urgent tasks (Byström, 2002, Hersberger, 2001, Julien and Michels, 2004, Robinson, 2010). Valued qualities of using people as sources include that people know more than they record in documents, that explaining an information need to a human allows the information need to evolve in the course of the conversation, and that people may mould their expertise to the problem at hand (Cross and Sproull, 2004, Groth and Bowers, 2001, Hertzum, 1999, Kidd, 1994). While multiple studies have investigated how and why people select other people when they need information, this literature is scattered. We will use the label expertise seeking for these studies. This review aims to analyse the literature on expertise seeking to identify patterns and repeated findings and to point toward mixed results and gaps in our understanding.

In the context of this review, expertise seeking is the activity of selecting people as sources for consultation about an information need. To clarify this definition, we note: First, expertise seeking is about source selection and thereby dissociated from communication, which concerns the interaction with the source subsequent to source selection. Second, expertise seeking is about the selection of people as sources. The selection of people involves, however, considerations about when a person is preferable to other types of sources. We prefer the term expertise seeking because it better includes these considerations than terms such as expert seeking and people finding. Third, the source is selected for consultation about an information need, thereby distinguishing expertise seeking from activities aimed at initiating extended collaboration rather than consultation. This distinction is somewhat malleable but, for example, excludes staff hiring from expertise seeking as defined in this review. Fourth, expertise seeking differs from expertise retrieval (in ways similar to how information seeking differs from information retrieval). Expertise seeking concerns the psychological, social, and organisational aspects of how people select other people as sources. Conversely, expertise retrieval addresses the algorithmic aspects of linking people to expertise areas in order to provide technological support for the identification of people sources. For reviews of expertise retrieval, see Balog, Fang, Rijke, Serdyukov, and Si (2012) and Becerra-Fernandez (2006).

Fig. 1 provides a framework of expertise seeking. The framework, a result of this review, illustrates that an expertise seeker’s selection of one out of several possible sources is affected by selection criteria, aims to satisfy an information need, takes place in a context, and may face barriers. The review first considers which sources are selected, then turns to the multiple factors that influence the source-selection process as implicit or explicit selection criteria, and finally addresses barriers to expertise seeking. In more detail, the review covers eight topics:

  • 1.

    Ranking of information sources: Are people among the sources most frequently used? What are the most frequently used people sources?

  • 2.

    People versus documentary sources: How are people and documentary sources balanced against each other? What factors affect this balance?

  • 3.

    Internal versus external sources: How are sources internal to a seeker’s organisation balanced against external sources?

  • 4.

    Quality versus accessibility: Is the selection of people as sources determined by source quality, source accessibility, or both? Which components constitute quality and accessibility?

  • 5.

    Task-related factors: How is source selection affected by factors such as task equivocality, task complexity, and task importance?

  • 6.

    Seeker-related factors: How is source selection affected by factors such as job experience, self-esteem, and gender?

  • 7.

    Contextual factors: How is source selection affected by factors such as the strength of social ties between seekers and sources and their hierarchical level in an organisation?

  • 8.

    Barriers to expertise seeking: What are the barriers that complicate, degrade, or prevent expertise seeking?

Research on expertise seeking is important because the activity of expertise seeking is practically important to seekers, who may get different input for their decisions depending on whom they consult. In addition, people spend as much as 56–65% of their working time communicating to obtain and supply information (Pinelli et al., 1991, Robinson, 2010), thereby making source selection important to spending this time effectively, or to reducing it by removing barriers to expertise seeking. In terms of implications for research, a review of expertise seeking may provide an overview of previous work, improve our understanding of the activity of expertise seeking, and inform work on expertise retrieval by collecting the many factors that are important to source selection in addition to the topical area of the source’s knowledge.

Section snippets

Method

The 72 papers included in this review were selected and analysed through a process that involved formulating criteria for including papers in and excluding papers from the review, inspecting a total of 7945 papers for inclusion or exclusion, and analysing the content of the included papers.

Review results

In the following, we analyse the reviewed papers with respect to the eight topics listed in Section 1. The three first topics concern the sources. The frequency with which different types of sources are selected is analysed by reviewing rankings of information sources (Section 3.1), seekers’ selection of people or documentary sources (Section 3.2), and their selection of internal or external sources (Section 3.3). The five remaining topics concern the source-selection process and the factors

Discussion

The reviewed studies provide a rich empirical base for investigating expertise seeking. The studies do however not converge on a small set of factors that explain most source selections. Rather, a variety of factors has been found to influence source selection. In the following, we discuss the theoretical frameworks applied in the reviewed studies, some methodological issues important in making sense of the study findings, and the implications of the reviewed studies for research and

Conclusion

Expertise seeking, the activity of selecting people as sources for consultation about an information need, is widespread in practice and has been the subject of considerable research. This review of 72 expertise-seeking papers shows that people are an important source of information and that the selection of people as information sources is affected by a variety of quality-related, accessibility-related, task-related, seeker-related, and contextual factors.

People, especially work-group

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