Academic social bookmarking: An empirical analysis of Connotea users

•Academic users' social bookmarking behaviors and perceptions are investigated, using Connotea as the basis for analysis.•Experienced users prefer social bookmarking but less experienced users favor traditional methods.•Low use frequency appears to result from the perception that the benefits do not outweigh the costs.•Academic users prefer to use their own bookmarks than bookmarks created by others.

Three groups of social bookmarking users, namely experienced users, users with moderate level of experience, and novice users, were investigated, in terms of their reported tagging behaviors, perceived usefulness of social bookmarking in information discovery and management, and perceived usefulness of the bookmarking features provided. Based on the empirical analysis of the Connotea users, who are primarily in academia, the study shows that experienced academic users generally prefer to use social bookmarking while moderately experienced and novice users still prefer to use the traditional bookmarking methods, such as creating and using bookmarks on a dedicated computer. Experienced academic users were also found to create more tags per bookmark comparing to the other two groups. Most novice academic users, however, only created one tag per bookmark, which just met Connotea's minimum requirement. Surprisingly different from the collaborative design nature of the social bookmarking systems, the study finds that our participants, particularly experienced academic users, prefer to create and use their own bookmarks rather than sharing bookmarks created by others. In fact, experienced users have significantly higher frequency (once every two weeks) of creating bookmarks than the other two groups (once a month or less). In addition, website design features and functions, such as automatic collection of bibliographic information, are regarded by all participants as helpful for information discovery. The in-depth examination and discussion of the opinions of Connotea users may be useful for further improvement of the design features and usage applications, particularly for academic social bookmarking websites. The results may also have potential implications to the future development of social bookmarking services in general.