Page 237 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

236 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

academic value of microblogs seems relatively weak. Users are likely to doubt the academic value
of microblogs, which thus restricts the academic use of microblogs. The purpose of this study is to
facilitate the healthy development of microblog academic information activities. As an important
type of social media, microblogs attract tremendous users. Microblogs could potentially not only
promote academic exchange among users but also enhance the visibility and use of academic
information through users’ writing, recommendation, review, forwarding or sharing links, resulting
in the effective dissemination and diffusion of scientific and expertise knowledge. Moreover,
microblogs encourage users to generate contents. Users can express and publish diversified views,
and the generated contents lack traditional review mechanisms. In this situation, the information
quality of microblogs becomes the issue with which users are more concerned.
The dual-route models were first proposed by sociopsychology scholars, suggesting that
individuals’ attitude change towards a behavior is mainly determined by the central route and
the peripheral route. This study focuses on users’ academic information seeking behavior in the
context of microblogs, suggesting that users’ attitude change towards this behavior is impacted by
information quality (central route) and information source credibility (peripheral route). Given the
entertainment nature of microblogs and the rigor of academic information, the attitude examined
in this study includes both cognitive response and affective response. Firstly, according to prior
literature, the information quality second-order model and the research model exploring impacting
factors of microblog academic information seeking behavior were developed. Then a questionnaire
survey was conducted and 294 valid data were collected. The Partial Least Squares (PLS)
Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to conduct data analysis.
From the results, the information quality second-order model developed in this study is
confirmed, where relevance is mostly reflected by information quality, showing that the judgment
of information quality mostly lies in the judgment of the relevance of information when users
seek academic information in microblogs. Meanwhile, information quality and information
source credibility have significant and positive impacts on users’ cognitive response and affective
response, with the impact of information quality being larger than that of information source
credibility. Furthermore, cognitive response and affective response positively impact microblog
academic information seeking behavior, with the impact of cognitive response being larger than
that of affective response.
The dual-route models suggest that the attitude change formed by the central route is more robust.
Consequently, the information quality of microblogs should be given top priority by both the
institutions holding microblogs and microblog developers so as to facilitate the healthy development
of microblog academic information activities. Only in this way, can the user experience be enhanced
and the stable academic need stickiness be generated by users, with the results that microblogs
would play positive roles in facilitating academic information exchange and dissemination.
Given the weak academic effect of microblogs and the insufficient consciousness of academic
information seeking by users at the current stage, future research is invited to continuously track