Abstract:

Users’ mental model is an important conception, which can be used for explaining the mechanism of user interaction with a comprehensive academic database. This study explored the composition of users’ mental model of comprehensive academic database, by using semistructured interviews. We mainly interviewed fifteen undergraduate students, which recruited by convenience sampling. The results indicate that users’ mental model has unscientific and correctness features, and the emotions is an important dimension of users ' mental model of comprehensive academic database. The study has implications in designing information literacy training content and optimizing comprehensive academic database.

Key words: Mental model, User, Comprehensive academic database, Retrieval, Emotion