Scholarly Reading Practices Survey 2016

The study examined Finnish researchers' use of different printed and electronic publications in their work, such as scientific journals, articles, books, reports, and social media. The study is part of Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King's survey series launched in 1977 following the reading practices of researchers in different countries and scientific fields. Finnish data have also been collected in 2006 but this dataset has not been archived at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive. The 2016 project was partly funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. The survey charted researchers' common reading practices as well as publishing of different types of scientific articles and other publications. The way that the respondents' work time was distributed between different types of tasks was charted as well as how many publications of different types they had authored within the previous two years. It was also examined how researchers searched for information, published scientific work, and cited the work of others. Questions also covered how much time the respondents spent on reading articles, how many scientific articles and other types of publications they had read within the previous 30 days, how recent the publications that they read were, reasons for reading them, what language they were in, how they found the publications and received access, where they read the publications, which scientific field the publications represented, and how useful they considered different publication formats for their work. The significance of social media was charted with questions regarding, for instance, how important different services and tools were for their work (e.g. blogs, cloud services, institutional repositories, academic online communities, reference management software). The respondents were also asked about how important different features of electronic publications were (e.g. compatibility and readability on different devices, possibility to share publications, advanced navigation features, global language support, possibility to embed audio into publications). Background variables included scientific field, job title, age, and type of workplace.