this paper expands on Bates’ 1996 article about information seeking of interdisciplinary scholars, so you’re pretty much obliged to go read this thing now.
one particular interesting point for me as a librarian is taken from the result of the authors’ survey of physics and astronomy faculty on their perceptions of how interdisciplinary they thought the literature in their special areas of research was. those that felt their area’s literature was fairly concentrated (as opposed to “scattered,” or broad) had the highest rate of e-print archive usage. this has potential implications for the kinds of archives/back files of e-journals that a library may choose to purchase. it would be advantageous for a library to understand the perceived interdisciplinarity of a field before the purchase; if the field considers its literature to be more concentrated than scattered, the higher the use of the back files will be.
article in press: Jamali, H. R., & Nicholas, D. Interdisciplinarity and the information-seeking behavior of scientists. Information Processing and Management (2010), doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2009.12.010
