Draft:Naresh Kumar Agarwal

Agarwal was born in Gangtok, Sikkim, India in the late 1970s. He attended Tashi Namgyal Academy (TNA), where he was a top-performing student throughout, head boy, and received the Founder’s medal for All-round best student. He was raised in a joint Marwari business family that traded in cardamom. He grew up speaking Marwari at home and Nepali with his siblings, later becoming fluent in English and Hindi at school.

In 1995, he received a full scholarship from Singapore Airlines and Neptune Orient Lines for undergraduate studies in Singapore. The scholarship came with a 6-year bond to work for a Singapore-registered company upon graduation. He earned a Bachelor of Applied Science (Honors) in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University in 1999. After working in the software industry, in voice-over-IP/telecommunications, bioinformatics, and digital cinema technology start-ups from 1999-2004, he joined the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he completed his Ph.D. in Information Systems in 2010. His dissertation, titled Information Seeking Behavior and Context: Theoretical Frameworks and an Empirical Study of Source Use, established contextual frameworks for how individuals prioritize and use information sources.

Agarwal joined Simmons University in 2009 as an Assistant Professor. He was tenured and promoted to an Associate Professor in 2015, and to a full Professor in 2022. He has held significant leadership roles within the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), serving as its President from 2021 to 2022 and remaining on the board as Past President through 2023.

Agarwal’s research focuses on human interactions with information and technology, specifically in the areas of information behavior (IB) and knowledge management (KM). His information behavior research revolves around the interaction spaces between the person and information, often mediated by technology. With the user at the center, he advocates making technology work for people, rather than the other way around. He has studied different types of information behaviors such as information seeking, searching, serendipitous encountering, sense-making, information avoidance, non-response, and the overall context. He views knowledge management as a related concept, approached from an organizational lens. Looking at both IB and KM has enabled him to investigate how the actor moves between information and knowledge, and across KM cycle processes like knowledge creation, sharing, and use.

For his doctoral research, he surveyed 352 working professionals in person in Singapore on the contextual factors affecting their choice of information sources – whether face-to-face, synchronous chat/calls, email, web-based resources, or physical books. The study found that source quality and access difficulty are important antecedents of source use, regardless of the source type. Moreover, seekers place more weight on source quality when the task is important. Online information and face-to-face were the most preferred types,. His work on context extends to information behaviors of medical residents, a child using the iPad, students, faculty, librarians adopting KM, etc. This culminated in a 2018 book ‘Exploring Context in Information Behavior’, which has made an important contribution to the field of IB by reconciling the complexities of context into a coherent whole.^[1] “Apart from the obvious researcher in information behavior, academics, and graduate students, it also holds value for systems designers and those developing information services and information retrieval systems.” The book has been cited in publications from diverse fields – library and information science, human-media interaction, environmental sustainability, underground space technology, science education, data engineering, diversity and inclusion, etc.

Agarwal makes a seminal contribution in his paper unifying models and integrated models of information seeking behavior and presenting unified models of information behavior.^[2] The paper was started in 2006 and published in 2022. “With more than 15 years in the making, and multiple revisions over the years, this paper is an example of ‘the struggle involved in getting published’” He also wrote a 2023 article synthesizing information behavior research in the 21st century. Agarwal’s 2012 paper on ‘making sense of sense-making’ attempts to make Brenda Dervin’s sensemaking accessible for the researcher. He interviewed Brenda Dervin for ‘Project Oneness World’ and put together a panel on sense-making for the 2025 ASIS&T Annual meeting. He arrived at a series of frameworks for include serendipity in information behavior research and proposed a definition of serendipity in IB, which has been well cited.^[3] This work continued through panels and a journal article reconciling serendipity in KM. His Ikigai book includes narratives of serendipitous information encountering and sold over 2,000 copies in its two versions for different geographies. His research on the causes and effects of information avoidance and non-response behaviors by smartphone users led to two journal papers, and a conference paper. It resulted in a keynote speech in Sopporo, Japan in 2019 and received the ASIS&T SIG USE Best IB Conference Paper Award, 2020. A follow-up study has over 4,000 survey responses. Agarwal’s paper on disinformation behavior sought to model the fake news phenomenon and led to multiple international keynote and invited talks. A poster based on this paper was among Wiley’s Top 10 most downloaded articles of 2022.^[4] His upcoming co-authored book with Routledge, “Managing knowledge in libraries: research, implementation, innovation” synthesizes over a decade of work on KM in libraries. In a bibliometric study published in 2024, his 2015 paper on knowledge retention and transfer in libraries was listed as a top-cited article in “knowledge transfer in libraries”. A 2020 bibliometric study listed Agarwal among the “Most Prolific Authors in ‘KM in Libraries’” and the Scopus Elsevier database shows him among the top two most-cited authors in the ‘knowledge and libraries’ area 2000-2025.^[5][6] His Project Oneness World initiative contains biographical interviews of IB leaders. It has led to preserving the memory of stalwarts such as Brenda Dervin after her passing,^[7] a celebration of Tom Wilson’s life in an invited journal article and helps inspire IB students. It received the 2023 iSchools research grant and the 2025 ASIS&T Bob Williams Grant.^[8][9] A jury member wrote that the study explores, “information science's historical and intellectual development through the lived experiences of its most influential leaders…. It fills a critical gap by synthesizing their oral histories…, weaving…individual trajectories into a collective narrative of the field’s history.”

Agarwal has made important contributions to research methodology and theory building. His unified model paper is a methodological contribution guiding researchers to reconcile contradictions in other research areas.^[2] His paper on ensuring construct validity when designing surveys has been widely cited across different fields such as software engineering, higher education, information systems, public health, nursing, psychology, management, etc. He has proposed qualitative and quantitative instruments. He has made important theoretical contributions in several IB areas – in ‘context’ by proposing the elements of context and the contextual identity frameworks, in IB overall by proposing unified models, in information encountering by proposing a framework of continuums, in disinformation behavior, and in KM by proposing models for knowledge retention/transfer, technology use, and service innovation.

Agarwal’s research has been cited over 2,000 times as per Google Scholar. In 2021, he was inducted into the inaugural class of Distinguished Members of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). In 2020, he was listed under “Most Prolific Authors in ‘Knowledge management in Libraries’” as per Web of Science. Based on a search in the Scopus database by Elsevier, he is among the top two most-cited authors in the ‘knowledge and libraries’ area (2000-2025).^[5][6] He was listed in the Top 2% Scientists List for 2025 by Stanford/Elsevier. In March 2026, Agarwal was nominated for the University Award for Excellence in Research by the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science.

In 2020, Agarwal received the ASIS&T SIG USE Best Information Behavior Conference Paper Award for the paper, “Response to non-response: How people react when their smartphone messages and calls are ignored”. His short papers based on journal articles, “Understanding and fighting disinformation and fake news: Towards an information behavior framework” (2020) and “A Bibliometric Analysis of the Annual Meeting Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology” (2021) were among the most downloaded articles listed by Wiley.^[4] In 2021 and 2023, he was awarded the Hazel Dick Leonard Faculty Fellowship by Simmons University for his book project.

Agarwal has also been recognized for his leadership and service. He received the ASIS&T James M. Cretsos Leadership Award in 2012, and the Watson Davis Award for Service,^[10] in 2024.

Apart from his academic endeavours, Agarwal is an accomplished artist. He primarily paints in watercolor, but also uses other media such as oil, pencil, charcoal, acrylic, etc. His art often explores his personal life journey across India, Singapore, and the United States. His paintings have been on the covers of multiple books and magazines, including his own books.^[1][11][12] He has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Sikkim India, Singapore, and Greater Boston USA. In 2007, his painting process was featured on the television show Travelling Palette in the Philippines. The painting he created during the broadcast was auctioned for charity. Inspired by the 19th-century artist Raja Ravi Varma and his lithographs of Hindu deities, Agarwal launched a desk calendar project in 2026. The calendar features twelve paintings (primarily watercolors) depicting Indian festivals and cultural facets. These calendars have been distributed across India, the US, Singapore, and UK.

To keep up with his learning and practice of Fine Arts, Naresh took extensive online courses from contemporary Indian master artists such as Nishikant Palande, Vikrant Shitole, and Arnab Bera. In 2022, he participated in the Strada Easel Challenge, completing 61 daily paintings over the months of January and September.

Agarwal has been learning Hindustani Classical singing since 2018 and performs in local venues. He is fluent in English, Hindi, Nepali, and Marwari, with a working knowledge of several other languages. He has been consistently learning Sanskrit since 2016 and Spanish since 2023. Between 2004 and 2007, he modeled and acted for Singapore television.

He is an advocate for the philosophy of "Oneness," - seeing ‘one in many’ and ‘many in one’, which he explores through his happiness talks, publications, and his Project Oneness World initiative. In this initiative, he gathers human stories through interviews.

Currently, he lives in Massachusetts with his family.

• Association for Information Science and Technology
• Information Seeking Behavior
• Knowledge Management