Designing Research Support for Graduate Students: A Needs-First Approach—Hajra Klair, Virginia Tech

Designing Research Support for Graduate Students: A Needs-First Approach Graduate students are primary users of scholarly information systems. Prior studies report that their workflows are dominated by general-purpose search engines rather than discipline-specific tools [25, 26]. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) are an underused resource in these workflows. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) indexes more than seven million ETDs, yet ETDs remain peripheral to most graduate research practice [19]. We describe a planned research support tool for graduate students. The work draws on our prior research on the ETD corpus [11–13] and is informed by a planned focus-group needs assessment with seven stakeholder strata. The needs assessment is the first stage of requirements gathering for the tool. We describe its sampling frame, its twelve-theme question bank, and its analysis plan. We then sketch six candidate tool capabilities, a one-year research agenda with falsifiability criteria, and a 5–25 year impact trajectory.