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Introduction
Tom Wilson's article "On user studies and information needs" was published in the first issue of the Journal of Documentation in 1981 ([51] Wilson, 1981), and is republished in this issue. It dealt with a subject, which has remained very much, a "live" topic in the information sciences for the intervening 25 years. (It is interesting to note that, of the three other papers in the journal issue, the topics of two of them - the need for better understanding of, on the one hand, citing behaviour, and, on the other, of the rationale for the founding of new journals - also remain relevant. The basis of the fourth paper, use of Colon Classification for retrieving passages to text, appears to belong to the past, but who knows?)
Noting that the investigation of "information needs" had been the subject of both debate and confusion, Wilson stated as the aim of his article:
... to attempt to reduce this confusion by devoting attention to the definition of some concepts and by proposing the basis for a theory of the motivations for information seeking behaviour.
These seem modest aims, appropriate for what is actually a rather short paper. It is striking to note - whether or not the paper did indeed reduce the confusion of terminology and concepts - how its content, and in particular the set of models which it presented, anticipated, and arguably inspired, many of the newer concerns of information research to the present day.
The paper has been cited over 100 times in the journals of the ISI databases, as well as in numerous book chapters, reports and conference proceedings. The great majority of the ISI citations are in English language library/information journals, with a small number in broadcasting and communications sources. Nearly half are in four major sources: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology , Journal of Documentation , Information Processing and Management , and Library and Information Science Research . The largest number of citations per year, 11, occurred in 2003 and 2005, showing the continuing interest in the article. Scanning the citing articles shows that some are theoretical and methodological in character, while others report studies of information users and information needs in variety...