But try to trace those online sources from student bibliographies, as two university librarians did last year with 136 team-written papers from Economics 101, and you might not find much. In a first-ever study, published in February's Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Phil Davis and Suzanne Cohen located online sources directly from citations only 55 percent of the time for papers written in 1999, and a paltry 18 percent of the time for 1996. Websites had moved or disappeared, or URLs were misspelled. Students knew they were getting high-quality stuff. Now we aren't the gatekeepers anymore.
Students decide on their own, and many are ill-prepared to do that.
For one thing, it indicates that they're taking advantage of online services to find articles and studies that also appear in physical form but might not be found in the library stacks because someone else has them or the library doesn't carry them. Online material in certain fields is often more current than what's in the stacks, students say, and Web research is a smarter use of their time. The Web is fine if they're analyzing websites themselves as artifacts of culture, but what is published on the Web is more of a problem. Vanity publications can and do appear. Other faculty aren't as concerned, asking only that students use websites from academic journals, government agencies, and science foundations.