Update on a Pioneering Study of the Scholarly Attitudes and Behaviours of Gen Z Researchers (Harbingers 5z)

ABSTRACT This paper is not so much an ‘industry’ update as a research update, albeit one that will help us better research and understand the scholarly communications industry. To this end, it reports on important changes to the Harbingers international longitudinal study of the scholarly communications of early career researchers, whose finding have been widely reported in this journal for the past decade (with around a 100 articles published). It covers the set‐up and early progress of a pilot project, just started, investigating the new researchers of tomorrow – Generation Z (Gen Z), the successors to the Millennials who have, until now, been the main focus of study (with this phase of the research designated H5z). The project also employs a new method for analysing the conversational, open interview data produced by the studies, and which is a Harbinger hallmark; this should speed the analysis of this data considerably.