Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study investigated scholarly communication guidance as a core service by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana, academic library to doctoral students, research and scholarly communication needs and skills of doctoral students and effective dissemination of research findings by doctoral students for national development. The study also explored the adoption of a research portal as part of the academic library website for scholarly communication guidance to doctoral students. A case study research design with KNUST as research site, with a mixed method approach was used. Semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, documentary analysis and a bibliometric survey of an institutional repository were employed as data gathering tools. A scholarly communication guidance model based on Costa’s proposed adaption of Garvey and Griffin’s models of scholarly communication, Wilson’s information behaviour model and Bjôrk’s scholarly communication lifecycle model was developed to frame the study.

This paper deals with the information retrieval in research portals with the intention of the retrieval in scientific publications. We define concepts related to the information retrieval, classification and knowledge representation. We also present existing search tools used as the initial inspiration for the design of the search intergace. Futhermore we describe the implementation as well as the process of collecting sample data. In the last chapter we discuss usability of the developed web application.