This paper aims to underline the factors impacting the usage of academic journal articles by PhD students in Indian universities.
Following a detailed literature review, the paper bases itself on a grounded theory and provides insights drawn from structured interviews conducted via email with 134 PhD students who were based in public and private universities in India.
The paper underlines that there are five factors (institutional; task complexity; relevance and application; information quality; and technical) that are responsible for impacting the usage of academic journal articles by PhD students in their scholarly work. Such factors are linked with resource constraints faced by universities, lack of motivation on the part of teachers and students, non-availability of an electronic library, etc.
The present study is a major contribution to the extant literature on the usage of academic journal articles for pursuing scholarly activities.
