1 Manifestations of expert power in gatekeeping: a conceptual study Reijo Savolainen Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences Tampere University, Finland (to be published in Journal of Documentation, vol. 76, 2020) Abstract Purpose - To elaborate the picture of the relationships between information and power by examining how expert power appears in the characterizations of gatekeeping presented in the research literature. Design/methodology/approach - Conceptual analysis examining how expert power is constitutive of the construct of gatekeeper, and how people subject to the influence of gatekeeping trust or challenge the expert power attributed to gatekeepers. The study draws on the analysis of 40 key studies on the above issues. Findings – Researchers have mainly constructed the gatekeepers´ expert power in terms of superior knowledge and skills applicable a specific domain, coupled with an ability to control or facilitate access to information. The gatekeeper´s expert power has been approached as a contextual factor that facilitates rather than controls access to information. The power relationships between the gatekeepers and those subject to gatekeeping vary contextually, depending the extent to which the latter have access to alternative sources of information. The findings highlight the need to elaborate the construct of gatekeeping by rethinking its relevance in the networked information environments where the traditional picture of gatekeepers controlling access to information sources is eroding. Research limitations/implications - As the study focuses on how expert power figures in gatekeeping, no attention is devoted to the role of social power of other types, for example, reward power and referent power. Originality/value - The study pioneers by providing an in-depth analysis of the nature of expert power as a constituent of gatekeeping. Keywords Expert power, Gatekeeping, Information seeking, Information Sharing, Power Paper type: Conceptual paper Introduction In studies on human information behaviour (HIB), researchers have seldom examined how power- related factors affect the ways in which people seek and share information. Rare examples of conceptual studies explicitly focusing on this topic include the keynote address delivered by Lucas Introna at the 2 nd International Conference on Research in Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts (ISIC). Introna (1999) emphasized that power is a factor with great potential to explain the complexities of information behaviour; he strongly called for further research on the relationships between information, people and power. Unfortunately, this call has not received much attention among researchers; HIB studies explicitly concentrating on the issues of information and power can be counted on the fingers of one hand (Mutsheva, 2007; 2010; Olsson, 2007; Heizmann and Olsson, 2015; Olsson and Heizmann, 2015). Seen from a broader perspective, however, the situation is better because HIB research offers a rich body of literature which is relevant to the examination of the relationships between information and power. Many of these studies have focused on the issues of cognitive authority (e.g., Wilson, 1983; Rieh, 2002; Hirvonen et al., 2019) and This is the author accepted manuscript of the article published ahead-of-print (April 14, 2020) in Journal of Documentation. The final published version at: https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2020-0010 This AAM version is under the CC BY-NC Licence 4.0. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited