A User-centric Approach towards Understanding the Influences of Social Tags Choices for Academic Papers

This paper explores the influences of creating social tags for academic papers by novice users over time. This study distinguishes itself from related studies by examining users´ perspectives through three factors - document, social and personal factors. In the study, which was conducted in two time periods, diaries and interviews were employed to elicit the subjects´ influences of tags choices. During the two time periods, subjects were asked to collect and tag academic papers. They were requested to fill in their diaries after assigning tags to the papers. Subjects were also interviewed to gain more insights. The outcome from both diaries and interviews were then triangulated, where the themes related to the factors emerged. Themes that emerged include documents usage, document attributes, social ties, opinion expression and organizing strategies. Results showed that the tags assigned by the subjects were influenced by all the factors. The influence from documents usage, document attributes and organizing strategies tended to play a more dominant role than social ties and opinion expression. Also, there did not seem to be any change in the levels of influence between the two time periods. Implications of our findings are discussed.