Identifying the Factors Influencing the Serendipitous Acquisition of Information: A Systematic Review

Information behavior includes intentional and unintentional behaviors. One of the unintentional information behaviors is the serendipitous acquisition of information. This type of behavior, which complements the inquiry, has an important role in the learning behaviors and everyday information acquisition by researchers. The occurrence of this type of behavior is influenced by the factors that the present study was conducted to identify.

 This systematic review employs the eight-step process of the Okoli review method. The research population includes English articles indexed in the Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, and Persian articles indexed in the Islamic World Science Citation Database (ISC), Scientific Information Database (SID), MagIran, Normagz, and Ensani. After applying the search strategy, the retrieved articles were imported to the EndNote 20 software and duplicate articles were removed. Then, based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 40 related articles were studied in order to identify the factors affecting serendipitous acquisition of information.

Results :

The history of the study of the serendipitous acquisition of information goes back more than three decades. The serendipitous acquisition of information is influenced by internal factors, external factors, and environmental characteristics. Internal factors are influenced by person's psychological and personality characteristics and can be created or managed by the person her/himself. Internal factors include information need, topical knowledge, Sagacity, curiosity, sensitivity, conscientiousness, extroversion, emotions, self-confidence, information literacy, enjoyment of the search process, and education. External factors such as time, status, and place are separate from psychological and personality characteristics of the person and can facilitate serendipity. Some environmental characteristics enables exploration and discovery, ease of access, connectivity, stimulus-richness, enables connections, trigger rich, highlights triggers, variety, contrasts, incompleteness, multi-reachability, and slowability cultivate serendipity. Despite the importance of serendipity in information seeking, it has not attracted the attention of Iranian researchers

Recent advances in information technology and the emergence of Web2 have created new horizons in the ways of obtaining information and have caused an increase in unintentional acquisition of information. Therefore, the way that such behavior occurs, and its effects and results should be investigated. Recognition and control of factors affecting successful acquisition of information could help the search process.