What Can Students’ Bibliographies Tell Us?- Evidence Based Information Skills Teaching for Engineering Students

Abstract

Objective - This project sought to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses in locating, retrieving, and citing information in order to deliver information skills workshops more effectively. 
 
 Methods - Bibliographies submitted from first-year engineering and second- and fourth-year chemical engineering students’ project reports were analysed for the number of items cited, the variety of items cited, and the correct use of citation style. The topics of the project reports were also reviewed to see the relationships between the topics and the items cited. 
 
 Results - The results show that upper level students cited more items in total than did lower level students in their bibliographies. Second- and fourth-year engineering students cited more books and journal articles than first-year students cited. Web sites were used extensively by all three groups of students, and for some first-year students these were the most frequently used sources. Students from all three groups had difficulties with citation style. 
 
 Conclusion - There was a clear difference in citation frequency between upper and lower level engineering students. Different strategies of information skills instruction are needed for different levels of students. Librarians and department faculty members need to include good quality Internet resources in their teaching and to change the emphasis from finding information to finding, interpreting, and citing accurately.

Analysis of Citations in Undergraduate Papers

“…For first-year bibliographies, 67.1 percent of citations were to Web sites, while in bibliographies from fourth-year students 22.9 percent of citations were to Web sites. 8 All of the studies mentioned above use student work selected from a single discipline, course, or year of study. In contrast, Jake Carlson selected papers from classes across all disciplines that assigned a research paper.…”

An Exploration of ebook Selection Behavior in Academic Library Collections

“…While our own earlier work saw some readers checking for edition information [8], and a charitable interpretation of this behavior would assume that readers were using this material-particularly the copyright page-it is unlikely that this is the case. Buchanan and McKay show that the majority of those seeking books even in high end bookshops have a limited knowledge of the kinds of metadata (such as publisher) contained in front matter [3], and [1] and [26] demonstrate that both academics and university students struggle to create citations (using the kind of information found in front matter). Malama et al found that, at least for fiction books, many readers felt that ebooks had too much introductory material and would have preferred to go straight to the text [15].…”

Developing a Systematic Patent Search Training Program

“…These include questionnaires, pre-tests and post-tests, focus groups, and interviews 11 . As well, citation analysis, a branch of biliometrics, is another research method that has been widely used in collection management and research work evaluation, although few studies have used this technique to develop information literacy programs by analyzing students' assignments.…”