How professionals read online documents to formulate recommendations

Abstract

Professionals often read with the purpose of formulating a judgment based on what they have read. Increasingly, the documents to be used are available electronically. This adds to the complexity of the task. In the presented study, seven participants read two sets of articles that were used to formulate recommendations regarding two technical communication issues. Readers proved to be not only driven by their judgment task but by the articles they were reading as well. This strategy reduced reading efficiency. An electronic notepad was used to store copied citations from the articles. Readers evaluated these citations superficially during reading, while they evaluated them more thoroughly when the recommendations had to be written.