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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Recurso educativo Open Access |
| Language: | en |
| Published: |
2005
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED490802 |
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Table of Contents:
- Improving the Quality of University Libraries through Citation Mining and Analysis Using Two New Dissertation Bibliometric Assessment Tools Tunon, Johanna Brydges, Bruce Academic Libraries Universities Schools of Education Citation Analysis Doctoral Dissertations Research Skills Graduate Students University libraries are becoming increasingly aware of the need to assess the quality of students' information literacy and library research skills and to use this assessment data to effectively improve the quality of university library services to graduate programs. However, libraries have had difficulties finding ways to accomplish this both systematically and objectively. This study examined the relative merits of using citation analysis and evaluative bibliometric techniques to "mine" reference lists obtained from doctoral dissertations for assessment purposes. In the past, citation analysis has been used in libraries for collection development and to assess the quality of undergraduate students' library research skills. Citation analysis, however, also has the advantage of being an unobtrusive and non-invasive analytical tool that can be used to quantify students' meta-cognitive skills, beyond basic informational and procedural knowledge as captured by a pretest/posttest evaluation. This study builds on three recent works: Two studies (Beile, Boote, & Killingsworth, 2003, Haycock, 2004) used citation analysis to examine the scholarly nature of education dissertations, while another study (Green & Bowser, 2003) developed a rubric to examine the effect of a faculty/librarian collaboration on the quality of literature reviews in education dissertations. The current study, while applying both techniques to reference lists of 143 doctoral applied dissertations' from the Child and Youth Studies program at Nova Southeastern University, goes the next step by creating a method of citation analysis for the purpose of gathering evaluative, bibliometric data. The writers developed an objective rubric that mechanically awarded points for currency, type of document, and certain document-specific criteria, while the second rubric employed a subjective assessment based on the judgment of two assessors using five criteria (number and variety of types of documents cited,of understanding as demonstrated through the inclusion of theoretical and background documents as well as scholarliness, currency, and relevancy of the resources). Qualitative descriptors were used to score the criteria on a four-point scale. A comparison of the two overall scores provides evaluative evidence of the quality of students' library research skills as demonstrated in this graduate capstone endeavor. (Contains 8 tables.)