Research and publication
During her career, Tenopir focused on information access and retrieval, electronic publishing, scholarly communication, and the information industry. [1] In 1988, Tenopir published Managing Your Information: How to Design & Create a Textual Database on Your Microcomputer with Gerald Lundeen. The book was a practical guide to creating a textual database from start to finish for internal library or organization use. [7] In 1990, Tenopir was selected as the first title in the Database Searching Series published by Libraries Unlimited. Her book, Issues in Online Database Searching was a collection of her "Online Databases" articles with other of her published articles. The book evaluated the efficacy of search strategies in online databases with analysis and evaluation of the online databases themselves. [8] In 1995, Tenopir was awarded the Special Libraries Association's Steven L. Goldspiel Research Grant for her proposal to study the impact of electronic publishing on special libraries. Her study focused on the electronic journal publishing and distribution systems and their effects on special libraries and researcher choice with regard to paper vs electronic journals. [9] Tenopir's electronic publishing research foresaw the transition of researchers from print to electronic and digital materials. [10] Tenopir argued that electronic journals and digital publishing could lower costs, speed up the publishing process, and increase access to scholarly research. [11]
Tenopir was awarded another grant in 2001, this time from the National Science Foundation, to create the NSDL, the National Science Digital Library, designed to make available high-quality teaching materials in science, technology, engineering, and math. [12] Tenopir's research often focused on the sciences, including engineering. In 2004, she published the book Communication Patterns of Engineers with Donald King. In the book, Tenopir and King provide a meta-analysis of engineering communication patterns concluding that an increase in communication correlates to an increase in engineering productivity. The study tracked 715 scientific journals and included 15,000 participants over a 40 year period. [13]
Tenopir delivered the Miles Conrad Award Lecture at the annual National Federation of Advanced Information Scientists meeting in 2006, outlining her theory that libraries build bridges between information and information seekers. Libraries should understand the information seeking habits of their users, and they should build on-ramps to information. Libraries must also recognize that the bridges they build will never be big enough to satisfy library users. [14]
In 2012, Tenopir, again with Donald King, published the results of an almost 35 year longitudinal study of researchers' academic journal reading habits. The study found that for the first time since 2005, reading of scholarly articles by the researchers in the study had not increased. [15] The study also found that researchers tend to spend about 30 minutes reading per article and that over half of researchers read their articles digitally. [15] In 2013, she participated in another National Science Foundation project called DataONE. The project surveyed over 1300 scientists about their data sharing habits with a goal of identifying barriers to information access. [16] In 2020, Tenopir was award a $399,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study the international consequences of COVID-19 pandemic measures on early researchers' scholarly communication practices. [17] This grant was a continuation of a four-year longitudinal study with fellow researcher Dave Nicholas on scholarly communication practices in the natural and social sciences. [17]
In 2024, scienceOS, an AI research agent for scientists developed in Germany, released the Tenopir Update which allows users to add PDFs in their chat with the AI. The update is dedicated to Tenopir in honor of her work in understanding the academic role and use of electronic resources and digital information. [18]
