Jim Jansen studies the uses and affordances of the Web for information searching and ecommerce, with a focus on the interaction between the person and the technology. His current areas of research include Web searching, sponsored search, and online social networking.

Jim has 200 or so authored and co-authored research publications. He is co-author of Web Search: Public Searching of the Web, co-editor of Handbook of Research on Weblog Analysis, author of Understanding User-Web Interactions Via Web Analytics, and author of the book Understanding Sponsored Search (Cambridge University Press). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Internet Research.

Jim is an associate professor with the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He is a graduate of West Point and has a PhD in computer science from Texas A&M University, along with master degrees from Texas A&M (computer science) and Troy State (international relations).