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Exploring librarians’ intentions to collaborate in research: A model integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior and Social Exchange Theory

While many studies have attempted to understand librarians’ academic engagement (e.g. publication), there is a dearth of knowledge about the determinants of the research collaboration behavior of librarians, especially in Chinese libraries. This study focused on Chinese academic librarians and investigated factors that affect their intentions to engage in research collaboration based on a conceptual framework integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior and Social Exchange Theory. A survey containing 318 respondents was used to evaluate the research model by partial least square based structural equation modeling. The results showed that the integrative model could explain 53% of the variance of academic librarians’ intentions to collaborate. The findings revealed that attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavior control, and perceived benefits showed significant direct influence on Chinese academic librarians’ collaborative intentions. Perceived positive consequences (benefits, relationships, and reputation) in research collaboration had indirect effects on academic librarians’ intentions through attitude. Meanwhile, there were significant differences existing in path coefficients for librarians with different disciplinary backgrounds, professional ranks, and research projects. This study contributes to the existing literature by empirically studying factors that impact Chinese librarians’ intention to research collaboration and examining the intrinsic relations among these factors. It helps the universities’ managers and librarians finding ways to boost factors in supporting the research collaboration.