  As more scholarly content is born digital or converted to a digital format,
digital libraries are becoming increasingly vital to researchers seeking to
leverage scholarly big data for scientific discovery. Although scholarly
products are available in abundance-especially in environments created by the
advent of social networking services-little is known about international
scholarly information needs, information-seeking behavior, or information use.
The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps via an in-depth analysis of
the information needs and information-seeking behavior of researchers, both
students and faculty, at two universities, one in the U.S. and the other in
Qatar. Based on this analysis, the study identifies and describes new behavior
patterns on the part of researchers as they engage in the information-seeking
process. The analysis reveals that the use of academic social networks has
notable effects on various scholarly activities. Further, this study identifies
differences between students and faculty members in regard to their use of
academic social networks, and it identifies differences between researchers
according to discipline. Although the researchers who participated in the
present study represent a range of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, the
study reports a number of similarities in terms of the researchers' scholarly
activities.
