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Introduction
According to Pettigrew and McKechnie (2001), the application of the theory in an area of research is a hallmark of its academic maturity and a requirement for delimiting it as a scientific discipline. For Fidel (2012), on the other hand, in addition to contributing to the development of a scientific field, the use of the theory in empirical research makes it easier to design, helps us to compare and interpret the results and paves the way to placing a study in a broader context. By following these guidelines, research on information behaviour (IB) has become an authentic test bed for various theories and theoretical models.
By the late twentieth century, McKechnie et al. (2001) stated that in comparison with other areas of Library and Information Science (LIS), research on IB was a field with a highly developed theoretical basis. This theoretical background has continued into the early years of this century, with works of a theoretical character the most widely cited in specialist literature (González-Teruel et al., 2015). These reference points are theories that come from other social sciences and also theoretical models generated by the user's observation in specific environments. In both cases, the ontological, epistemological and methodological suppositions that inspired them are highly varied. Case and Given (2016) thus emphasise the difficulty arising from the abundance and diversity of these theories' philosophical presuppositions. This diversity prevents the formation of communities of discourse to discuss and compare the results of research into IB. In fact, specialist literature seems to have more interest in adopting or generating a new theory for studying a phenomenon than it does in the phenomenon itself, which in our case is the description, prediction or explanation of the user's IB. This is what makes it necessary to look back from a critical perspective when faced with a rich and abundant range of theoretical proposals, which may at times also be scattered and confusing. In order to do so, we have to track the diffusion and influence of the theories and theoretical models of IB and analyse how they have been assimilated into the design of research contributing to the growth and consolidation of the field.
This was the approach taken by Vakkari (1998) when analysing the growth of...