News Release

Bringing students back from Web to scholarly sources

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Cornell University

ITHACA, N.Y. -- In this world of instant Internet information, the use of scholarly documents in writing term papers at U.S. colleges and universities has plummeted and the use of undependable Web resources has soared.

Despite this grab-the-information-and-go attitude, there is good news from the stacks. A Cornell University library sciences study shows that when instructors set minimal bibliographic guidelines for doing research, the number of citations of scholarly materials used returns to levels of the pre-Internet world. Online scholarly resources can range from the Congressional Record to academic research reports.

The findings are the final update in a longitudinal study, conducted between 1996 and 2001, of the research habits of undergraduate students in a Cornell microeconomics class taught by John Abowd, professor of economics. An article by Philip Davis, a librarian at Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library, describing the study, "Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior: Guiding Student Scholarship in a Networked Age," appears in the latest issue of Portal , (Vol. 3, No. 1), a peer-reviewed library-sciences journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

As colleges and universities in the United States have become wired to the Internet, research that was once the exclusive province of the campus library now can be done in computer labs or dormitory rooms.

In a previous part of their longitudinal study, Davis and Suzanne A. Cohen of Cornell's Martin P. Catherwood Library, found that many Web addresses, known as uniform resource locators, or URLs, cited in student term-paper bibliographies often were incorrect or referred to documents on the Internet that no longer existed.

In 2001 Abowd established minimum standards in his microeconomics class for term-paper citations, and he began deducting points when the citations had incorrect Web addresses. As a result, the URLs cited that were still valid after six months increased to 82 percent in 2001 from 55 percent in 1999. And because of the new standards, the total number of Web citations sank to 13 percent in 2001 from 22 percent in 2000, the peak year.One result of changing standards is that more students now obtain references directly from original sources, such as government papers and legal documents, albeit online. However, book usage has not recovered to pre-Internet levels. Davis points out that students now are citing more government documents and legal cases in their research, which have always been difficult to find in print but are more easily found online.

"Setting minimum guidelines in assignments ensures that students will identify relevant scholarly literature," says Davis. "This helps students develop skills necessary to distinguish scholarly resources from popular ones and gives students the ability to choose from a multitude of resources without having the professor being unduly prescriptive."

The solution to obtaining credible sources, he says, is not to ban Web-based citations but to provide the students with acceptable parameters for using the Web. Says Davis, "The results of this study clearly indicate that students will meet the expectations of the professor when those expectations are clearly articulated and enforced."

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