Their theoretical insights and empirical data offer a compelling model for librarians and information scientists studying information seeking and scholarly communication. The many intriguing parallels between subsistence foragers and scholarly information seekers can be explored using an optimal foraging framework. In this deductive, microeconomic approach, the basic requirements of foraging models include an actor choosing among alternatives, a currency by which the actor measures costs and benefits, a set of constraints limiting behavior and a strategy set specifying the actor's range of available options. By establishing some empirical cost-benefit currency, analysts are able to rank foragers' preferences, predict which resources will be pursued, and specify the net returns associated with particular choices. Literatures that are poorly connected to other bodies of work are often overlooked or ignored by information seekers, even when apparently relevant to their concerns.
Scholars spend years mastering the patterns of ideas and names that go together.
Because of their training and active participation in a field, they are able to achieve a balance between familiar, core sources and unfamiliar, novel ones scattered widely throughout the published record. An individual's own knowledge or published body of work, however, rarely defines the breadth of the information base, even in a narrow specialty. Instead, productive scholars maintain an awareness of the key authors in one or more central areas of research concern and demonstrate only nodding familiarity with work from more peripheral areas. Distinctly interdisciplinary work presents special information-foraging challenges. By operationalizing scholars' foraging behaviors through the empirical trace of their cited references, analysts are able to study the underlying intellectual structure and interrelatedness of research areas.