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Research is a systematic activity in searching for new information and understanding. World Wide Web (WWW) supplies trillions of information to feed the research purposes. Scholarly publications in particular, provide specific information to contribute in generating a new body of knowledge. This paper will specifically look at the role of novice research students (from both undergraduate and postgraduates level) and the need-and-want while searching for scholarly contents. The survey took place in the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya with 77 undergraduates (Final Year Students) and 18 postgraduates’ students. The questionnaire consists of five sections for undergraduates and six sections for postgraduate. The main different between the questionnaire is that for the postgraduate part, we add another section particularly to elicit students publishing history. The result shows that majority of the student spent six to ten hours a week to search for information for research purposes. Online search engines are the major sources for information. Complete electronic theses and final year students’ project are rated highest to be the type of work that student’ wishes to deposit in IR. Efficient keywords search and free to use are chosen by the majority of the student as the factors that will motivate them to use the scholarly repository. This paper will outline overall result of the survey and highlights the analysis of the searching behavior section. A requirement specification in providing semantic support while doing research activity in domain specific area i.e. Computer Science will be discussed. We will conclude the paper with the direction of future works.

Stream: Measuring Learning Outcomes

Paper: Research Activity on the Web

Ms. Maizatul Akmar Ismail serves as a lecturer at the University of Malaya Kuala Lumpur, teaches subjects related to information science such as Accounting Information System, Database, Information Retrieval and few others. Her research interests include E-Commerce and Smart Card Application.