Guides: Foundations of Reasoning: Determining Your Information Needs

What is an Information Need?

"An information need is simply a question that needs to be answered. That question can take many forms, and it may be brought on by your curiosity or assigned to you by your boss or your teacher...In the context of education, these questions you need to answer are called research questions. Your question puts forth a hypothesis, the idea you will prove or disprove through your research."

Source: Concise Guide to Information Literacy, page 31

Further Reading: The Process of Asking Questions
PARTIAL ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the area of the question—its generation, its relation to the retrieval system, and its effect on the inquirer. Four levels of question formation may be isolated and analysed: the actual, but unexpressed, need for information; the conscious within-brain description of the need; the formal statement of the question; and the question as presented to the information system.

How to Identify Your Information Need

To define your information need, you must:

Understand the context and purpose of the information-seeking task
Identify what sources you’re being asked to find
Recall relevant existing knowledge and identify any gaps or uncertainties

Before attempting to search, ask yourself the following questions:

Why are you looking for information? Do you need a topic overview or are you conducting in-depth research? This will change where and how you look.
How many sources do you need? Do they need to be high-quality academic sources, or will a Wikipedia article suffice?
What do you already know about the topic? What could you easily find out (e.g., via your course materials)? What don’t you know? What questions do you have?

Source: "Preparing to Search", University of Suffolk https://libguides.uos.ac.uk/finding-information/understanding-information-need