Characterising and evaluating information seeking behaviour in a digital environment: Spotlight on the bouncer
The paper delineates and explains an emerging, but significant, form of digital information seeking behaviour among information consumers, which the authors have called bouncing. The evidence for this behaviour has emerged from five years of deep log analysis studies  an advanced form of transaction log analysis  of a wide range of users of digital information resources. Much of the evidence and discussion provided comes from the scholarly communication field. Two main bouncing metrics were applied in the log studies: site penetration, which is the number of items or pages viewed in a session, and return visits. The evidence shows that (1) a high proportion of people view just a few items or pages during a visit to a site and, (2) a high proportion of visitors either do not come back to the site or they did so infrequently. Typically those who penetrated a site least tended to return the least frequently. These people are termed bouncers. They bounce into the site and then bounce out again, presumably, to another site, as a high proportion of them do not appear to come back again. Possible explanations  negative and positive, for the form of behaviour are discussed.
information seeking behaviour bouncing log analysis information user