Estudo do comportamento de busca dos usuários do Portal Periódicos Capes

Abstract

The present research evaluated the information behavior faculty have when searching for information in the Capes Portal of E-Journals. The Capes Portal of E-Journals offers more than 35 thousand scientific journals and is considered the largest of its type in Latin America. The faculty selected for carrying out this research were distributed throughout 17 federal Brazilian universities from the 5 geographic regions of the country. The data was collected by means of a web-survey which used a mainly quantitative methodology, with some qualitative data. The analysis of the search strategies used in the CAPES Portal revealed that 80% (4100) of the respondents), when searching for a subject, initially search a reference database in the Portal to identify articles or periodicals, and only after that access the full text journal databases . The results show that 44 % of respondents used the search by journal title; 38 % used the option of searching by area of knowledge and 18 % chose to search by publisher. The research also analyzed qualitative data about main barriers and problems to use the Portal. The comments were subdivided into nine initial categories, which were regrouped into three main categories according to their content similarity: (1) Personal Aspects; (2) Aspects of the System and (3) Institutional Aspects. The analysis revealed that Category 3, Institutional Aspects, concentrated the greatest part of the comments (48%), while Category 2, Aspects of the System obtained 42% of the comments, and Category 1, Personal Aspects, had the smallest number of the comments, 10%. The Portal could be more utilized if factors in Categories 3 (Institutional Aspects) and 2 (Aspects of the System), where most of the comments fall, were addressed. The results show that the Capes Portal is not used in its full potential.