Cornell researchers have found that a simple rule in their writing assignments can increase the percentage of online scholarly sources in student bibliographies relative to online drek, and increase the percentage of print sources relative to online sources. The rule is to deduct points for cited online sources whose URLs are broken at the time the paper is graded. The full study is reported in a print-only article: Philip Davis, "Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior: Guiding Student Scholarship in a Networked Age," Portal, 3, 1. (Thanks to LIS News.)
(PS: We know that persistence is not tightly correlated with quality. Otherwise the long-term preservation of digital scholarship would not be a problem. But it's interesting that a loose correlation is enough to let teachers use persistence as a surrogate for quality, or at least to assign persistence and see quality rise. But this is more like "neatness counts" than a reliable test of quality. Davis' conclusion that this sort of rule "ensures that students will identify relevant scholarly literature" seems to overreach. But I've only been able to read the Cornell press release, not the full article.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/05/2003 08:59:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
