Comprehensive E-Research Process Framework and Effects of Electronic Scientific Databases on Its Adoption

Today, the scientific communications are developed and expanded on the internet and the famous World Wide Web service, and the popularity of the electronic scientific databases (ESDs) such as ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and Scopus is an evidence of this claim. In addition to providing scientific contents, the ESDs offer researchers diverse scientific web services such as scientific communications and collaborations. In accordance with the electronic developments such as ESDs and their scientific web services, the scholars’ research process is evolved so as the birth of the electronic research (e-Research) process makes scholars initiate their research, drive it, and reach its determined goals electronically. In this paper, we focus on the ESDs’ scientific web services role in the research process. After presenting a classification for the scientific web services, a comprehensive framework for the e-Research process is proposed. Also, the effects of the scientific web services on adoption of the e-Research process are studied. For this purpose, an appropriate questionnaire was prepared and delivered to the graduate students in the Engineering and Management disciplines of Tarbiat Modares and Amirkabir universities, located in Tehran, to assess the scientific web services’ usages in their research processes development. After analysis of the acquired data, the findings showed that the scientific web services of information storage and sharing, searching, and communications are the most popular and useful web services in the scientific community, and therefore, have great effects on the adoption of the e-Research process so that the more convenient and desirable these services are, the more popular they get