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The study explored users' tendency of confirmation bias when processing congenial vs. uncongenial electronic-word-of-mouth (e-WOM) about mystery fictions, a hedonic product category with strong experience and hedonic characters.

A two-stage judgment approach was employed where the participants were asked to judge a set of mystery novels twice: one before, and another after they were exposed to positive and negative e-WOM. The first-stage judgment established two favored and two disfavored titles by each participant. They were then asked to read six consumer reviews – three positive and three negative – for each of the four titles. The procedures created four review evaluation situations: two congruent and two incongruent, which allowed the authors to assess the participants' perceptions of congenial and uncongenial reviews and their rating adjustments of the titles. Participants' involvement in mystery novels was also measured to test its moderating effect on confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias in the evaluation of e-WOM was observed and reinforced by the user's involvement in the genre. Congenial reviews were perceived to be significantly more credible, better reflect the intrinsic value of a title and less subjectively motivated than uncongenial reviews. Furthermore, after exposure to equal amount of positive and negative e-WOM, an asymmetrical adjustment of final rating of the titles was observed. A significantly greater downward adjustment was observed for disfavored than favored titles. Stronger positive confirmation bias was also observed in the evaluation of WOM.

Previous studies on e-WOM have shown conflicting findings on the relative efficacy of positive vs. negative reviews. By introducing the factor of prior attitudes, the study demonstrated that whether WOM is consistent with an individual's prior attitude, rather than the valences of WOM in itself, determines its persuasiveness. Thus, it established the confirmation bias in users' processing of e-WOM. The finding highlights the importance for marketers to establish a positive initial impression, which, as the findings demonstrated, helps alleviate the damages caused by negative WOM.

This is the first study that has ever attempted to study the effect of confirmation bias during the users' processing of e-WOM in an experimental setting. By having the participants judge the books before and after exposure to congenial and uncongenial e-WOM, the authors were able to establish the link between the users' prior commitment to a book and their subsequent judgment of both the titles and the e-WOM.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-01-2020-0026

One of the chief purposes of bibliometric analysis is to reveal the intellectual structure of a knowledge domain. Yet due to the magnitude and the heterogeneous nature of bibliometric networks, some sorts of filtering procedures are often required to make the resulting network interpretable. A co-word analysis of more than 135,000 scholarly publications on Buddhism was conducted to compare the intellectual structure of Buddhist studies in three language communities, Chinese, English and Japanese, over two periods (1957–1986 and 1987–2016). Six co-word similarity networks were created so social network analysis-based community-detection algorithm can be identified to compare major research themes in different languages and eras. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A series of filtering procedures was performed to exclude less discriminatory keywords and spurious relationships of a large, cross-language co-word network in Buddhist studies. Chief among the filtering heuristics was a percolation-transition based method to determine the similarity threshold that involves observing the relative decrease of nodes in the giant component with the increasing similarity threshold.

It was found that the topical patterns in the Chinese and Japanese scholarship of Buddhism are alike and observably distinct from that of the English scholarship. Furthermore, a far more drastic changes of research themes were observed in the English literature relative to the Chinese and Japanese literature.

The filtering procedures were shown to greatly enhance the modularity values and limited the number of modularity classes; thus, domain expert interpretation is feasible.

Chinese internet literature (CIL) platforms afford freedom for creative expression and opportunities for direct interactions between writers and fans and among fans. Enabled by these platforms' technological and commercial arrangement, a new form of literary production and consumption has emerged, the most significant of which is the role of fans participation. A social network analysis of the interaction patterns in online fan communities was conducted to investigate fan communication activities at scale. Of particular interest is how the socio-technical system of the site influences its network topology.

Online forums for 10 popular fiction titles in Qidian, the leading CIL platform, were analyzed. Social networks were constructed based on a post–reply–reply threaded discussion structure. Various aspects of fan interactions were analyzed, including number of replies per post, post length and emerging network patterns.

Similarities in network topology shared by CIL fan forums and other online communities, such as small-world and scale properties, were discovered; however, distinct network dynamics were also identified. Consistent with previous findings, writers and moderators, along with a few highly ranked fans, occupied the central positions in the network. This was due to their social roles and the nature of their posts rather than, as the conventional explanation goes, preferential attachment.

The findings demonstrate how community-specific circumstances and norms influence interaction patterns and the resultant network structure. It was revealed that in the CIL sites, the users adopted the technologies in unexpected ways. And the resulting network topology can be attributed to the interplay between the sites' official arrangement and users' adaptive tactics.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0596.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role different information sources (or cues) play in forming users' mental representation of a work in an academic library setting. Of particular interest is discerning how these information sources influence borrowing decisions.

A large‐scale user survey featuring two‐part questionnaires was utilized in an academic library setting. The questionnaires were designed to ascertain those information sources exerting a formative influence on users' information‐seeking behavior, especially the routes by which users came to know of a title and the sources by which they infer its content.

Evidently users adaptively make use of a variety of cues to help them fulfil their information needs. These cues significantly reduced the uncertainty faced by users making a borrowing decision, even after their sense of domain familiarity was controlled for. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for library services. It is suggested that libraries could provide a more “cue‐rich” environment that supports users' decision making and facilitates exploration of their collection.

The research questions were framed in the language of decision‐making theory, which, as the research demonstrates, sheds light on the dynamics between “cue validity” and judgment uncertainty. It also demonstrates the applicability of the “accuracy‐cost” framework in the study of human information‐seeking behavior.