This article focuses on the analysis of information seeking and use by newspaper science writers in Taiwan and takes "guanxi" into consideration. Semi-structured in-depth interviews are conducted to explore how science writers represent the task problems in the social context and how they seek information to solve them.
The research finds that the most important information resources science writers use are news releases, news wires, and internet resources. And, to science writers, information seeking is the process of identifying a series of goals and constraints. By meeting the balance of all the goals and constraints, science writers may develop integrated problem solutions. Finally, it ’s the key factor for science writers to obtain information through the "guanxi" with news sources.