Browsing by Author "White BD"

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    I didn’t know what I didn’t know – Postgraduate science students as new library users
    White BD; Rainier BA
    While considerable effort goes into equipping undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and medicine with knowledge discovery skills and an understanding of the scientific literature, many of them complete their first degrees with a relatively basic level of competence. Undergraduate science education demands an intensive development of subject knowledge and technical skills with less emphasis on the primary literature, and unless an information literacy element is expressly built into science programmes undergraduate students are not routinely required to make use of library resources (Bogucka & Wood, 2009; Wiegant, Scager, & Boonstra, 2011). Postgraduate study, particularly at masters and doctoral level, places quite a different level of demand on students, and even to formulate a research question requires an extensive knowledge of the existing literature. The first part of the thesis journey is the literature review which provides a theoretical and methodological grounding of the whole project, but students often arrive at postgraduate study poorly equipped to perform this task (Hoffmann, Antwi-Nsiah, Feng, & Stanley, 2008; Miller, 2014). Those skills that they have acquired tend to be based around Google and Google Scholar (Wu & Chen, 2014) which provide a good result for relatively little effort, but which lack the functionality to fully support a literature review at this level (Johnson & Simonsen, 2015). Increasing internationalisation of postgraduate education is another factor impacting on this situation, although it would be wrong to assume that English-speaking students or those from “developed countries” possess the appropriate skills for an advanced degree literature review.
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    The University of Google [Book review]
    (LIANZA, 14/07/2008) White BD
    Review of The University of Google by Tara Brabazon
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    Total availability of journal articles to Internet users
    (Emerald Group Publishing, 2014) White BD
    Purpose - To determine the outcome of the different measures taken towards open accessto peer-reviewed research by measuring aggregate availability of a sample of journal articles.This sample was then used to examine the factors contributing to the availability or non-availability of types of article. Design/methodology/approach - A sample of articles was taken from the Scopus database based on a search by surname. This minimised any skew that would result from a datasetbased on subject or source. The results were analysed to determine availability by subject and differences in availability based on source. Findings - Less than 30% of articles are available in their year of publication, rising to nearly 40% in following years. Repositories are responsible for slightly less than 50% of available articles. Substantial differences exist between the practices of scholarly societies and commercial publishers. Practical implications - Aggregate availability is dependent on a range of activities and current efforts need to be maintained to ensure its continuance. Moves towards open access by commercial publishers are not a major factor. Originality/value - This study differs from similar work by looking at access from the users’ viewpoint. Rather than looking at the total amount of material to which access is provided, it looks at the proportion of high-value information which is available. Read the article at http://www.massey.ac.nz/~bwhite/totalavailability.pdf