Rate My Professor Yu Chi

Dr. Yu Chi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at San José State University, within the College of Information, Data and Society. Her research specializes in health information behavior, human-data interaction, interactive health communication, and health misinformation. She examines laypeople's source selection in online health information-seeking processes, substance use discussions on social media platforms like Reddit, data literacy among teens, and online information encountering. Additional interests include exploratory search, open government data, social media and personal data management, collaborative information seeking, and knowledge acquisition in online communities. At San José State University, her expertise covers health informatics, human-computer interaction, information needs and behaviors of specific groups, and information retrieval theory and practice. She contributes to the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice Committee and serves as Communications Officer for the ASIS&T US West Chapter. Dr. Chi is also recognized as a leader in online asynchronous library and information science education and has advised the San José State University ASIS&T Student Chapter, which earned the prestigious Student Chapter of the Year award.

Prior to joining San José State University, Dr. Yu Chi was a PhD student in Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Computing and Information, where she participated in the iRiS Lab focusing on information behavior and exploratory search. She earned her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her scholarly work has amassed over 1,100 citations. Key publications include 'Deep keyphrase generation' (2017, Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, cited 542 times, co-authored with R. Meng et al.); '“It lives all around us”: Aspects of data literacy in teen's lives' (2017, Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, cited 118); 'Online information encountering: modeling the process and influencing factors' (2015, Journal of Documentation, cited 63); 'Laypeople's Source Selection in Online Health Information‐Seeking Process' (2020, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, cited 59); 'Investigating substance use via Reddit: systematic scoping review' (2023, Journal of Medical Internet Research, cited 50); and 'Self-Disclosure and Social Support in a Web-Based Opioid Recovery Community: Machine Learning Analysis' (2025, JMIR Formative Research).