ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries 164 / C&RL News ■ March 2002 They're not just using Web sites: A citation study of 116 student papers A fear often expressed by today’s academic librarians is that students at their institutions are using Web sites at the expense of more reputable resources, such as books and jour nals. In order to study just how true this perception might be at the College of Mount St. Joseph, a private college with an enroll ment of 2,500, I requested faculty to for ward to me bibliographies of student pa pers. Six faculty members, each from a dif ferent discipline, responded, leaving me to compile statis tics from a total Table 1. Percentage o f citations by resource type Discipline Citations Articles Books Web Site Sociology 260 20% 36% 44% Physical Therapy 234 82% 18% 0% Religion 149 20% 54% 26% Humanities 83 11% 42% 47% Nursing 66 41% 56% 3% Chemistry 62 48% 27% 24% of 116 papers. The results from this sample are discussed b e low. As Table 1 indicates, the papers yielded 854 citations. A look at the to Totals 854 tals reveals that the traditional research sources, articles and books, remain those most often used. To gether they made up 76 percent of the cita tions, Web sites accounting for the remain ing 24 percent. Exceptions to this pattern are the sociology and humanities papers, for which Web sites were used more than any other resource. No consistent pattern emerged from an examination of course levels for the papers submitted. The only upper-level courses were those from humanities and religion. The physical therapy and nursing courses were mid-level, and those from sociology and chemistry were lower level. Resource requirements outlined by instructors varied from course to course and had a more pro found effect. The physical therapy instructor did not al low the use of any Web sites; the nursing in structor required that students obtain her per mission to use them as sources for their papers. s As the numbers in Table 1 indicate, the instructors in the other dis ciplines adopted a more lenient stance. Certainly the 41% 35% 24% addition of Web sites has influ enced how students conduct research. If my institution is any true indicator, faculty ac ceptance of Web sites as legitimate resources is by no means universal, but seems to have become valid for many. Students have em braced Web sites and seem to use them with books and. articles. For the time being, how ever, the more traditional resources remain in the ascendancy.— Paul O. Jenkins, College of Mount St. Joseph, PaulJenkins@mail.msj.edu ries of steps, including digitizing the mi crofilm, converting more than 400,000 page images to text, correcting any errors re sulting from the optical character recogni tion software, and creating the search fea ture. Works currently available online are from authors such as Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving. Indiana University’s Digital Library Pro gram is the project host for Wright Ameri can Fiction, which is freely available on the Web at http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/ wright2/. New Web site profiles Sanford Berman Papers at UIUC The personal papers of prominent library cata- loger and activist Sanford Berman are now pro filed in a Web site at the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Maintained by the University Archives, the Web site high lights the career of Berman, former cataloger at the Southdale Hennepin County Library in Min nesota and best known for successfully challeng ing the outdated terminology of widely accepted library catalog subject headings. The Berman Papers are part of the ALA Archives held by the UIUC library and pro- mailto:PaulJenkins@mail.msj.edu http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/