Enlisting Social Media to Facilitate Collaborative Bibliography Building

Social media is an important everyday activity of most college-aged students. Such students are accustomed to collaborating with peers and seeking their advice. Bibliography building and library research generally are solitary endeavors. Formost college students, these endeavors are fraught with difficulties. The time is right to investigate whether the infusion of social media into bibliography building enables students to leverage their bibliography building efforts with those of their peers so that everyone benefits. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the social media aspect of collaborative bibliography building benefits students tasked with finding information for their research papers. It enlists data and analyses from an actual information literacy game that had a social media aspect to its collaborative bibliography functionality and was played by undergraduate students to answer research questions about the development of their topics, the origins of the sources players cited in their research papers, the number of sources players and nonplayers cited in their research papers, and whether players were more likely than nonplayers to cite scholarly sources. Answers to this study’s questions demonstrate the promise of social media for collaborative bibliography building, research paper topic formulation, and library research generally.