This study examines journalism student’s information use atSödertörn University during the writing process of theirbachelor thesis. The students are divided in two groupsfollowing the schools main bachelor programs majoring injournalism.The method used in this study has been a reference analysisof the student’s bibliographies along with five semistructuredinterviews. The study stems upon a socioculturalperspective and drives the thesis that information use is asituated activity. In order to analyze which criteria used bythe students to determine source credibility, the concept of“cognitive authorities” has been used.The results of the reference analysis show that the studentsuse a large quantity of empirical material, first and foremostnewspaper articles. Monographs and anthologies are alsofrequently used and a high quantity of those could also befound in the students’ curriculums.The interview study shows that the respondents are verymuch aware about the differences in writing a news articleand writing a bachelor thesis. But even if the information uselooks different between these two, the demands from thestudents of the sources are similar to the demands found inearlier research on active journalists; they ought to be current,easy to access and credible.This study strengthens the thesis that information use issituated and that the information use among these journalismstudents differs from earlier research groups. / Program: Bibliotekarie

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to investigate the information use in teacher education students’ degree projects. The first study is a reference analysis used to categorize the cited sources in 33 degree projects from the teacher education program at one Swedish university. The aim was to find out what types of sources were used, in particular the amount of citations to scholarly publications. The results of the reference analysis showed that the majority of sources used were text books. Scholarly publications amounted to 10% of the citations and scholarly articles were scarcely used. The second study consists of semi-structured interviews with six supervisors to gain understanding of their functions in relation to information use and to find out what judgements supervisors make of the reliability of sources. The supervisors were found to have four functions: suggest literature, refer students to the library, guide selection of sources and instruct on the use of literature. Doctoral theses, scholarly articles and research based literature are source types with a high degree of reliability according to the supervisors, while sources without a foundation in research were considered to have a low degree of reliability. The interview data was analysed using Norman Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis and the cognitive authority of source types was discussed. This thesis identifies a discrepancy between sources used by students and the supervisors’ judgements of reliable sources and the conclusion is that increased knowledge and use of scholarly publications holds a potential for teacher education and the teaching profession.