Transformation and influencing factors of scholarly communication based on knowledge transfer: A case study of science and technology literature

Purpose: The process of scientific literature use can be regarded as that of knowledge transfer. With the help of the knowledge transfer theory and data from scientific literature databases, we explored the behavior of scientific researchers during their scholarly communication, and studied the factors that influenced the behavior of researchers under network environment. Design/methodology/approach: Based on the literature databases of CNKI, Elsevier Science Direct and Springer Link, we used the knowledge transfer theory to construct a model for describing the scholarly communication process, which attempts to find out factors that may influence the communication behavior of researchers. With a focus laid on the absorption behavior of researchers during the knowledge acceptance process, we defined the independent variables of the model and proposed hypotheses on the basis of a comprehensive literature study. Afterwards, college students were invited to participate in a questionnaire survey, which was designed to prove our research model and hypotheses.Findings: Our results showed that during the scholarly communication, it is not the professional knowledge, but the ability and willingness for knowledge acceptance, organizations’ importance and internal atmosphere as well as knowledge authority and relevance that have played a positive significant role in the knowledge transfer performance. In addition, our distance indicators showed that knowledge distance and knowledge transfer performance have significant negative correlations. Research limitations: This study is mainly based on a questionnaire survey of college students, which may limit the generalization of our research results. In addition, more resource types need be considered for further studies.Practical implications: Under network environment, scholarly communication performance based on knowledge transfer theory could greatly contribute to the enrichment of the contentof the knowledge transfer theory, and stretch out the range of the field. In addition, our result could help commercial scientific database providers to learn more about the users’ needs, which would not only benefit both scientific communities and content providers, but also promote scholarly communication effectively. Originality/value: Compared with existing researches which mainly emphasized the model construction of scholarly communication, our study focused the knowledge relevance during the scholarly communication and influence factors that impacted on the performance of knowledge acceptance under the network environment, which could provide helpful guides for further studies.