Qian Yang

Qian Yang curriculum vitae (PDF)

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Qian Yang is a PhD student in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Tennessee. Knoxville. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in information science from Beijing Normal University, where she discovered her passion for linking cognitive psychology with information science. Recognized for academic excellence, she graduated early with multiple scholarships and soon began her career at the National Library of China (NLC).  

At NLC, Yang worked for more than a decade across different departments, providing professional reference services to thousands of patrons, including researchers, policymakers, and legal professionals. Her work spanned developing intelligent question-answering ontologies, designing personalized service strategies, conducting user behavior studies, and integrating AI into library services. She also gained expertise in bibliometric analysis, visualization, and statistical data analysis, delivering training and producing data-driven insights with tools such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and Python.  

Yang has published extensively on exploratory search behavior, cognitive modeling, and AI applications in libraries, with more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers. Her research contributions include a three-dimensional cognitive model of exploratory search behavior and innovative frameworks for intelligent library Q&A systems. She has led projects on service quality evaluation, knowledge fusion, and smart library development. Her research interests focus on human information behavior, cognitive modeling, and intelligent systems, with a particular emphasis on mixed-method approaches to understanding exploratory search and enhancing user-centered AI technologies. 

Research Interests

• Information behavior 
• AI 
• Information service