The Institute's research activity spans three main fields:

• Social sciences: social communication and media studies,
• The humanities: linguistics, literary studies, and art studies,
• Engineering and technology: technical information technology and telecommunications.

In particular, its areas of interest include issues related to information science and book science, such as:

• Information management: various aspects at the individual, team, organisational and broader societal levels; information processes – from acquisition (including search), through processing, organisation, transformation and protection, to dissemination and transfer; diagnostics of information products, services and systems; functioning of information services (especially information brokering); information logistics; data management; and tools for organising information, particularly information retrieval languages and metadata,
• Human information behaviour and its various determinants: selected aspects of information culture, information ecology and information literacy, as well as issues related to information and communication technologies from the perspective of their users,
• Scholarly communication: various aspects, including the functioning of academic repositories and issues related to digital and printed scientific information resources,
• Theory and methodology of information research – with an emphasis on qualitative methods,
• Contemporary library science, particularly the use of new technologies and digital libraries, as well as the role of books in social communication processes from a historical perspective,
• Automatic analysis of Polish texts, with a focus on vocabulary analysis and the development of computer dictionaries.

Members of the Institute of Information Studies team also conduct interdisciplinary research in collaboration with other units, for example with representatives of management and quality sciences (joint publication: Management of an organization in the information society: problems, opportunities, challenges : an interdisciplinary perspective) and with representatives of the discipline of technical information technology and telecommunications (project XPM NCN UMO-2020/02/Y/ST6/00070).