Students seeking information for their Master's theses: the effect of the Internet

The Internet has radically changed the global availability of scholarly publications. Today, a substantial part of the resources accessible for researchers and university students are offered through electronic site licenses, making the supply of easily obtainable information larger than ever. This brings forth an important question: what are the qualitative and quantitative effects of this development on the use of reference material in research and studies? To address this issue, masters’ theses’ reference lists from 1985, 1993 and 2003 were studied in three disciplines: economics, psychology and mathematics, followed by interviews of students who had finished their thesis in 2003. The findings showed a significant increase in the use of scholarly articles as references throughout the years, as well as significant differences between the reference lists of masters’ theses in the different studied disciplines. Differences included the amount of Internet resources that students used, how they sought and obtained publications, how they chose their sources, as well as how many articles they read for their masters thesis. The study also showed that respondents seemed relatively unsatisfied with the amount of training they had received in information seeking. Many respondents felt that additional training on using library databases would have been beneficial.