HIB & HCI: Common Interests in Different Communities

New connections between research and practice are necessary to address human information behavior in an increasingly technologically mediated world. Socio-technical systems for encountering, finding and sharing information have become sophisticated enough to blur the boundary between human and computer, and transform important design and research questions in human computer interaction (HCI) to questions for which human information behavior research (HIB) offers a deep tradition. We sought to understand present connections between these two progressively more interrelated research areas by performing a citation analysis of prominent HIB research with the most prominent publications in the HCI field. While the conceptual affinity between the two research fields is increasingly strong, the production of ideas and the exchange of research agendas between them is weak in the citations we analyzed. We propose a number of explanations for this gap, and suggest a more activist research agenda by HIB in the realm of HCI as one potential means for bridging this gap.