Referencing Science: Teaching Undergraduates to Identify, Validate, and Utilize Peer-Reviewed Online Literature

JOURNAL OF NATURAL RESOURCES & LIFE SCIENCES EDUCATION VOLUME 37 200 Scholarly research in the life sciences has traditionally centered on accessing peer-reviewed literature from hardcopy serials (Larivière et al., 2006) and citing this information in publications or presentations of scientific results. There are benefits to utilizing peer-reviewed scientific literature in undergraduate curricula (Scott and Simmons, 2006), but the trend for undergraduates is to eschew hardcopy serials in favor of online information in citing research (Oppenheim and Smith, 2001). In fact, surveys indicate that both students and professional scientists prefer utilizing online scientific literature (Leung, 1998; Bar Ilan and Fink, 2005). Likely contributing to this preference is the expanded accessibility of online literature (McDonald, 2007), deployment of Google Scholar, and the availability of a variety of searchable scientific literature databases (Kousha and Thelwall, 2007). However, despite its ready accessibility, use of online literature presents problems in higher education science curricula. Unlike hardcopy serials, online literature may not be permanently available (Dellavalle et al., 2003; Goh and Ng, 2007), and students must somehow validate online research literature as being peer-reviewed for accuracy and scientific content. Experts in searching literature online remain focused on their task, efficiently use key words associated with their topic (MaKinster et al., 2002), and look for specific cues to determine accuracy and validity of content (Rieh, 2002; Wathen and Burkell, 2002). But undergraduates may not fully understand the scientific process (Jordan et al., 2006), let alone the peer-review process for scientific literature. Hence, for them, identifying and validating online peer-reviewed scientific literature can be daunting. A complicating factor is that undergraduates often lack the vocabulary and literacy to adequately address abstract scientific research problems (Scott and Simmons, 2006). Students generally lack effective online search skills (Tabatabai and Shore, 2005). Also, undergraduates in life sciences frequently exhibit rudimentary critical thinking skills, so they are reluctant to engage in accessing and critiquing peer-reviewed scientific literature (Jordan et al., 2006; Scott and Simmons, 2006). A preference of undergraduates to read scientific information oriented toward the layman may be key to the problem (Scott and Simmons, Referencing Science: Teaching Undergraduates to Identify, Validate, and Utilize Peer-Reviewed Online Literature