Doctors’ Online Information Needs, Cognitive Search Strategies, and Judgments of Information Quality and Cognitive Authority: How Predictive Judgments Introduce Bias Into Cognitive Search Models Benjamin Hughes and Jonathan Wareham Department of Information Systems, ESADE, 60-62 Av. Pedralbes, Barcelona, Spain 08036. E-mail: benjamin.hughes@alumni.esade.edu; wareham@acm.org Indra Joshi Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust (SUHT), Tremona Road, Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom, SO16 6YD. E-mail: indrajoshi@hotmail.com Literature examining information judgments and Internet search behaviors notes a number of major research gaps, including how users actually make these judgments out- side of experiments or researcher-defined tasks, and how search behavior is impacted by a user’s judgment of online information. Using the medical setting, where doctors face real consequences in applying the infor- mation found, we examine how information judgments employed by doctors to mitigate risk impact their cogni- tive search. Diaries encompassing 444 real clinical infor- mation search incidents, combined with semistructured interviews across 35 doctors, were analyzed via thematic analysis. Results show that doctors, though aware of the need for information quality and cognitive author- ity, rarely make evaluative judgments. This is explained by navigational bias in information searches and via predictive judgments that favor known sites where doc- tors perceive levels of information quality and cognitive authority. Doctors’ mental models of the Internet sites and Web experience relevant to the task type enable these predictive judgments. These results suggest a model connecting online cognitive search and informa- tion judgment literatures. Moreover, this implies a need to understand cognitive search through longitudinal- or learning-based views for repeated search tasks, and Received June 13, 2009; revised August 12, 2009; accepted September 3, 2009 Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this article. © 2009 ASIS&T • Published online 24 November 2009 in Wiley Inter- Science (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.21245 adaptations to medical practitioner training and tools for online search. Introduction Information search is a process by which a person seeks knowledge about a problem or situation, constituting a major activity by the Internet’s millions of users (Browne, Pitts, & Wetherbe, 2007). The Web is now a primary source of infor- mation for many people, driving a critical need to understand how users search or employ search engines (Jansen & Spink, 2006). Extensive literature examines not only behavioral models detailing the different moves or tactics during Inter- net search but also decision making or strategies described as cognitive search models (Navarro-Prieto, Scaife, & Rogers, 1999; Thatcher, 2006, 2008). The latter examines the cog- nitive aspects of the moves users employ to optimize their search performance, exploring elements such as expert- novice differences or judgments on when to terminate the search (e.g., Thatcher, 2006, 2008; Cothey, 2002; Jaillet, 2003; Browne et al., 2007). This notion of judgment intro- duces a second stream of literature, Internet information judgments, where authors note that the use of predictive infor- mation judgments impacts decision making in search, based on an anticipation of a page’s value before viewing it (Rieh, 2002; Griffiths & Brophy, 2005). Cognitive search models rarely explore the impact of pre- dictive judgments. Most studies are based on tasks defined by researchers in experimental settings that are difficult to generalize to professional contexts or real use (Thatcher, 2006; 2008). Scholars have, therefore, called for research into JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 61(3):433–452, 2010