University students’ intention to use search engines for research purposes: A structural equation modeling approach

Teaching empirical educational research in higher education involves implementing a very useful web tool for bibliography/scientific literature research, a search engine specifically employed for scientific papers, such as “Google Scholar”. The aim of this study is to examine undergraduate students’ acceptance of technology, through their intention to adopt and use a specific search engine for research purposes. To accomplish this goal, a questionnaire was administered to 225 students from two Universities in Greece. The study was based on TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), reinforced by four external determinants (perceived self-efficacy, subjective norms, facilitating conditions and technological complexity), that contributed to the indirect prediction of the behavioral intention to use the particular search engine. The results of the survey confirm that the main factors of TAM, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness are significant determinants of students’ behavioral intention to use Google Scholar. Moreover, perceived self-efficacy, subjective norms, facilitating conditions and technological complexity have an indirect significant effect on behavioral intention. All these factors explain almost 60% of students’ behavioral intention to use this search engine. The results of this survey could be beneficial to the enrichment of good educational practices for the additional training of teachers, as well as to the improvement of the students’ skills in the implementation of this specific research tool. Besides, more stakeholders, such as librarians, or even human resources of big companies that construct and support similar systems, such as search engines, could also benefit from the present research.