Abstract:

Users are the final evaluators of information quality. There has not much attention been paid to the study of factors that affect the information quality of academic social networks from users' perspective. By using grounded theory 126 information quality evaluations of academic social networks' data have been analyzed according to several steps including open coding, spindle coding, selective coding, and theoretical saturation test. 120 initial concepts and 28 categories of information quality in academic social networks have been achieved, which have been summarized into 9 main categories. Eventually, a story line that influence the information quality of academic social networks was developed. On this basis, a model of the information quality influencing factors in academic social networks was constructed. The results show that the community, platform, user and content can affect the information quality of academic social networks. Among the four factors, content has direct impact on information quality of the academic social networks; user is not only a direct variable, but also an intermediary variable between the factors of community and platform. According to the findings, proposition and direction of the future research have been put forward.

Key words: Information quality, Influence factors, Academic social networks, User perception, Grounded theory