Limin Zhang, assistant professor of management information systems, has been notified her co-authored manuscript, “Exploratory Competitive Intelligence Through Task Complexity Analysis,” has been accepted for publication in Review of Business Information Systems. According to Cabell Publishing, the journal is blind reviewed with an acceptance rate of 11 to 20 percent. 

In the manuscript, Zhang explores how competitive intelligence is located on the Internet. Without proper tools or expertise, locating business relations information on the Internet can be tedious and time-consuming for end-users. In the paper, Zhang and co-authors examine the nature of competitive intelligence tasks, classify and decompose them based on a task complexity theory and propose norms for a context-based approach to retrieve competitive intelligence data. They developed a metasearch engine called “Competitive Intelligence Task Analysis and Retrieval” to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The study provides a framework to further explore the relationships among competitive intelligence tasks, interactive search and context-based search systems design.