Citation behaviour of information science students II: Postgraduate students

This paper reports the results of a study of student citation behaviours in the Department of Information Science, Loughborough University. The research methods were citation analysis of student dissertation bibliographies from 1998 to 2003, a survey of student's attitudes to citation behaviour and a test of student citation accuracy. The results of the investigation showed the majority of citations were to journals (32.6%), books (30.0%), and websites (24.0%). Websites were found to be cited more than books for the first time in 2002 and again in 2003. The number of citations to electronic formats increased over time. A highly significant difference was found in the correlation between the topic students studied and the numbers of citations to electronic journals. The overall percentage of citation errors was 24.9% and the majority of bibliographies (80%) were found to contain at least one error. Many students (56.9%) stated they did not feel confident when citing electronic materials. The results suggest that students have many reasons to cite, and that these are generally similar to those of scholarly authors.