Information-seeking research emerges from separate traditions focusing on one-time information-seeking behavior (research on curiosity), and long-term task engagement (research on interest). However, these lines of research have been developed independently, and there has been little discussion as to how they can be understood in an integrative manner. Here we present a general framework (the reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition) that provides a more comprehensive understanding of information-seeking behavior, effectively linking these two research traditions. This framework is based on existing reward-learning models that account for one-time information-seeking behavior, but extends them to explain its long-term development by incorporating the key role of knowledge accumulation.

Social science research is increasingly moving toward a model of open and accessible data. Accessibility opens possibilities of allowing secondary analysis, enhancing pedagogy, and supporting research transparency. This chapter argues that these benefits will accrue more quickly, and will be more significant and more enduing, if researchers make their data "meaningfully accessible," that is, when the data can be interpreted and analyzed by scholars far beyond those who generated them. Making data meaningfully accessible requires researchers to prepare data for sharing and to take advantage of a growing range of tools for publishing and preserving data.

The extant individualized appraisal system consisting of literature reviews in single studies, review articles, and the academic journal and press review system is insufficient for generating a comprehensive appraisal of what is (and is not) known on a given topic. This chapter presents a proposal for a new approach to comprehensive appraisal based on a lengthy paper or report that evaluates a scientific question in an encompassing fashion, assigning a degree of (un)certainty to each hypothesis under review and encompassing all work that has been conducted on a subject, published or unpublished. This type of appraisal would not overtake the primacy of discovery studies, nor would it completely supplant individual appraisal. Rather, it would complement both by allowing exploratory work to be properly vetted.