When students write research papers they use a variety of sources in their paper. These sources range from web pages to research articles. The purpose of this study was to decide whether or not undergraduate students would choose to use scholarly or non-scholarly sources when presented with both types of sources in a set of search results. Twenty Duke University students were recruited for the study. They were given a research topic and asked to perform a search. Both the search results and interface were fabricated by the researcher in order to control the experimental environment. The students were asked to rate the sources found in the results, choose four sources to use for their research scenario, and finally, were asked to explain reasoning behind their choices. The findings concluded that the students in this study were more likely to choose scholarly sources over non-scholarly sources and give these scholarly sources higher ratings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UNC_CH/oai:etd.ils.unc.edu:1901/289 |
| Date | 2006 April 1900 |
| Creators | Rosalyn Metz |
| Contributors | Diane Kelly |
| Publisher | School of Information and Library Science |
| Source Sets | University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
| Format | application/pdf, 361695 bytes, application/pdf |
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