Question topics on social Q&A sites: A multi-field analysis of Zhihu

Abstract

While studies examining user participation, question types or answer characteristics on social question and answer (social Q&A) sites, this corpus has lacked concern about question topics. Based on 68,273 questions of five different fields on Zhihu, this study analyzed the topic distribution and com-pared the differences. The results showed that most questions have five or three topics. One topic appeared more frequently than two and four topics, expect the health field. In addition, there is a significant correlation between the number of topics and the number of followers and answers of the question. The study sheds light to question topics selection for users and provides implications for user information behavior on social Q&A sites.