A Case Study of Periodical Use by Library and Information Science Students

摘要

There is a lack of information in the literature about the sources used for research by modern Master of Library and Information Science students in the United States, and so the objective of this project is to understand the use of periodical articles by these students. Specifically: do articles play a major role in student research, how current are the articles cited, and can a core group of periodicals be identified? 192 capstone papers from 2005-2010 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were sampled for a bibliographic analysis. The results show that periodical articles do play a significant role (making up 48% of all references) and are fairly current (49% of all article citations were from within five years). This study identified four core LIS periodicals among its results: The Journal of Academic Librarianship, College & Research Libraries, Library Journal, and Communications of the ACM. Finally, 85% of all periodicals were cited by only one student, indicating that MLIS students use a broad variety of periodicals for their research.