The cross-disciplinary information behavior of graduate students: a literature review

8/13/2019 The cross-disciplinary information behavior of graduate students: a literature review

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The Cross-Disciplinary Information Behavior of Graduate StudentsMartin Patrick

LIS 60613 Information Needs, Seeking, and UseFall 2013

Introduction

In this paper, I explore the literature on the information behavior of graduate students, both at the

masters and the doctoral levels, in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The choice toinclude all levels of graduate work across disciplines (excluding medicine) is an effect of the current stateof the literature over the past decade because the research is either cross-disciplinary or there is not

enough literature on a specific field or domain to warrant choosing a single discipline. As such, I willexplore the cross-disciplinary information behavior of graduate students and will focus in the paper on the

similarities and differences between the various academic disciplines in addition to the effect of theInternet. This paper will be structured according to the use of discipline. Research that focuses within asingle discipline, whether broadly (humanities) or narrowly (psychology), will be considered to be single

discipline.

All of the articles I have chosen present data that has been generated through qualitative or a mixof qualitative and quantitative research, and I have chosen to exclude articles that are focused on purelyquantitative data, such as those that work with deep log analysis or bibliometric work, for instance.Focusing on research collected in similar ways will allow for easier comparison of findings, particularly

in regards to motivation which is not necessarily identifiable in strictly quantitative data. By workingonly within the past decade, the literature presented here is sure to take into account the effect of theInternet on information behavior. One comment noted multiple times by the researchers regardinggraduate student information behavior is that studies done before 2000 did not account for the Internet,and thus may no longer be fully valid.

One large caveat is that all of these studies are local, and not multi-institution, studies that areoften done in order to understand if library services are meeting the needs of the particular graduate

students. While there are often generalizable nuggets buried in such research, there are sometimes large

components of the research that are not useful unless another institution has the exact same situation.While half of the graduate students at Notre Dame provide a very large sample size, the results from there

may not reveal anything about graduate students at Cleveland State, for instance. Another caveat is thatthe unchallenged assumption that library services, specifically information literacy programs, will

improve graduate student outcomes is deeply embedded in the literature. Information literacy programsmay in fact be beneficial, however none of the articles under review provide evidence for such claims.By assuming the claim to be true or factual, one can introduce distortions into the research.

Caveats aside, the literature is united on several points (the nuggets): graduate students willfollow the path of least resistance to find information, which in todays world is the Internet (specifically,

Google); graduate students display a mixture of behavior that can be seen in undergraduate students andin faculty, but will become more and more like faculty as they progress through their program; and,graduate students do not make much use of library services, particularly the library catalog and librarians.In sum, the literature suggests that libraries and librarians must do a better job of articulating the benefitsthey can provide to graduate students, especially if hard data can be presented that shows how beneficial a

support relationship with a librarian can be. This articulation of benefits must come about by fullyunderstanding the graduate students behavior and understanding the graduate school process.

Single Discipline Masters and Doctoral Graduate Students

Barrett (2005) focuses in on graduate students in the humanities, using interviews with tenstudents - three in masters programs and seven in PhD programs - to understand how similar or different


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graduate students are from faculty and undergraduates. Barrett argues that library services have beenshaped to support undergraduates through information literacy programs and to support facultys

information behavior. Graduate students information behavior has been assumed to resemble eitherfaculty or undergraduates. Barretts review of the literature to that point indicates that graduate studentsdo in fact tend to exhibit behavior similar to faculty, even though they also exhibit a lack of basic skills inwhat librarians refer to as information literacy. The lack of studies fully exploring the behavior of

graduate students leaves the question of whether graduate students behave like undergraduates or facultywide open.

Previous literature on faculty researchers in the humanities revealed a reluctance to usetechnology and strong preferences for monographs over journals, and to work on their own. Overall,Barrett identified six categories through which to compare his research on graduate students with the

previous research on faculty and undergraduate students: comfort with technology, interpersonal contact,

information sources, information retrieval patterns, research project initiation, and the focusing ofresearch projects. There were broad overlaps in these categories between the graduate students andfaculty/undergraduates, though in unexpected ways.

Graduate students share the following traits with faculty: reliance on subject experts for feedback,

want primary materials and will travel to get them, and project initiation tends to be haphazard. Likeundergraduates, they tend to use technology to find general information, rely heavily on advice of

instructors, and lack personal collections and expertise (prior knowledge). They are distinct from thesetwo groups through a very heavy reliance on supervisors during the research phase and because of verytight deadlines, imposed by supervisors and/or the program, that fundamentally affect behavior. Barrett

cautions, however, that humanities graduate students are not a homogenous group; there is amasters/doctorate divide. Librarians need to consider a Kuhlthau-like set of zones ofintervention ateach stage in the research process and, most importantly, at each stage of the graduate program as

graduate students information behavior becomes more refined the longer they are enrolled.

Harrington (2009) studied how graduate students make use of traditionally offered libraryservices, such as information literacy instruction, asking for help in the library, and the overall importanceof information literacy to research-intensive graduate students. Harrington then uses the information

gathered from the 36 graduate students in psychology to discuss how libraries should shape their practices

to better serve the needs of the graduate students. The results suggest that libraries should focus on e-resources (especially e-books) and that librarians must actively seek out the graduate students and offerhelp to them because graduate students will not ask for help on their own.

A problem with Harringtons reasoning is the assumption that a nebulous information literacy

is necessary for success. It may well be, but she does not adequately define what this means, nor discussany evidence to substantiate the claim that information literacy sessions will improve graduate studentsuccess. That, as Harrington and others have found, graduate students are more likely to approach aresearch supervisor than a librarian for help can indicate that graduate students are simply not aware ofwhat librarians can do for them, or it can mean that graduate students have for some reason perceived that

librarians cannot do for them what they feel they need. Thus this study suffers from this major unverifiedassumption that information literacy programs will necessarily improve outcomes for graduate studentsand that information literacy skills can only be taught effectively by librarians.

Harrington also seems to misunderstand the nature of a graduate program when she writes that,Disturbingly, 11 percent disagree and 8 percent remain neutral on the question of whether or not astudent should exhaustively search the literature before beginning a research project(p. 182). She seesin this the potential to repeat research that has already been undertaken, as well as creating flawed

research. There are two more flaws here. First, research that has already been undertaken may or maynot be acceptable in a graduate program; sometimes it is. Second, an exhaustive search of the literatureis difficult to define, and is predicated on rational choice theory, as will be discussed below. How cananyone ever know that there is not one more article out there to find? The question of how a graduatestudent knows when to stop searching for information will be raised by other authors covered here, such


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as Prabha, Connaway, Olszewski, & Jenkins (2007). Further, Liu & Yang (2004) propose a model ofgraduate student behavior based on their research, discussed below, which is reciprocal, rather than linear.

By better understanding how graduate education works, as Fleming-May & Yuro (2009) argue, librarianswill be better able to understand why the process might need to be reciprocal rather than linear, asHarrington seems to think it needs to be.

As Barrett has shown, graduate students are under tight deadlines to complete their research

project, and some of these projects are under the auspices of a classroom assignment. To the graduatestudents mind, at least at the masters level, one can imagine the desire to achieve the outcome of passingthe class with a strong grade rather than ensuring that an exhaustive search of the literature has beenundertaken. While studying students in the humanities, Barrett showed that the initiation of a research

project tends to be haphazard, and that the graduate students tend to rely heavily on their supervisors andothers for help in framing the research and in finding the resources, literature included, to complete the

project. Perhaps graduate students could get there sooner with more information literacy training;however they do get there on their own, as Barrett and as Vezzosi (2009) show, over the course of time.

Multi-Discipline Masters and Doctoral Graduate Students

Liu & Yang (2004) surveyed 540 graduate students enrolled in distance education through Texas

A&M University (TAMU) out of College Station, TX, and uncovered two key findings. First, graduatestudents strongly prefer information that is quick to retrieve, or to put it another way, convenient. This

point, they argue, is well proven in the literature particularly for distance students who are physically

separated from the home institutions library. This suggests that more electronicand web-based resourcescan have a powerful effect on graduate students information behavior. If graduate students chooseresources that are convenient and if the home institution can make more resources more convenient

through electronic and network channels, then graduate students should come to use the homeinstitutions librarys resources more. This is also borne out by nearly 50% of respondents reporting the

Internet as their primary information channel.Second, there was a strong association between field of study and the motivation to use

information. Their analysis of the responses revealed that the higher the self-reported motivation of a

respondent, the more likely they were to use primary resources provided by the TAMU library system.

48% of the humanities and social science (HSS) students reported themselves highly motivatedcompared to 27.6% of science and engineering students (STEM), and just 17.4% of business students.This correlates with HSS students reporting much higher levels of frequent usage of the TAMU resourcesthan STEM and business students do. For instance, 44% of HSS students use the TAMU library

resources frequently, while 48.2% of STEM and 75% of business students rarely use the library. Theauthors propose that this could be related to the type of assignments that HSS students have, or that HSSstudents are simply more intrinsically motivated to use the full spectrum of resources, including library

provided ones. It could also be, though the authors do not note this, that STEM and business students donot feel the TAMU libraries are meeting their needs and so they look elsewhere.

Liu & Yang also propose a model of distance learning students information seeking process.They call their model a reciprocal, interactiveprocess that involves multilateral communication

between the information environment and individual differences. Several of these individual

differences are related to the idea of convenience in the information behavior: time resource, computerresource, and information literacy, for instance. Motivation is also an important part of the individualdifferences. The environmental factors also are heavily related to convenience, including things likedocument delivery, library location, system usability, service, hours, etc. All of the factors, whether

individual or environmental, influence the five back-and-forth parts of the process: problem and needrecognition, information source selection, information searching, information evaluation, and the use ofinformation.


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George et al. (2006) used an interview method to understand the information behavior of graduatestudents in a cross-disciplinary study of a total of 100 students, suggesting perhaps more reliable and

significant results than Barretts 10 participants. Like Barrett, these 100 students are from masters anddoctorate programs, and include more doctoral students than masters students (64-36). 20 students werein humanities programs, 11 in business, 53 in STEM fields, and 16 in art and architecture. George et al.wanted to understand the issues related to graduate studentsinformation behavior, what resources are

used and valued, and the role that other people play in influencing information behavior.Not surprisingly, they found that graduate students prefer online resources and use the Internet

heavily. A strong majority in all fields report the Internet as the primary method, ranging from 62% ofrespondents in art and architecture as well as science to 91% of business students. Overall, 48% ofstudents prefer the Internet as the primary source because of perceived convenience. Most of this use issearching Google, but citation chaining and other searches are popular as well. While 77% of

respondents report using the Internet as their primary information resource, 96% report receiving helpfrom faculty, 73% from other students, and 40% from librarians. Other students and faculty play animportant role in information behavior as frequently as the use of the Internet. And while librarians areused, only in business and the humanities do a majority of students make use of them. George et al.

conclude by arguing for the importance of librarians; however this does not in fact appear to be aperception across all populations they surveyed, but suggests that certain disciplines may benefit from

more librarians.Like Liu & Yang, however, George et al. found more reliance on library resources by humanities

students, and less reliance by STEM and business students. Humanities users use library databases more

than the other disciplines, but use online journals and full-text databases less than STEM. The students inhumanities use print books more than STEM and business, and use print journals more than STEM and

business, as well. As suggested by Barrett, humanities students do make use of resources from other

libraries at a much higher rate, particularly interlibrary loan at 75%, than do STEM (~57%), art andarchitecture (50%), and business (36%). While Liu & Yang focused on distance students who do not

necessarily have access to library resources as do on-campus graduate students, that the usage patterns aresimilar suggest an underlying difference in behavior when comparing humanities with STEM and

business students.

The factors that George et al. found to influence information behavior are the perceptions of

convenience and speed. Interestingly, despite 65% of humanities students reporting the need forconvenience and speed, 75% of humanities students use the interlibrary loan process. Business studentsreport that lack of knowledge of existing resources and services along with course requirements heavilyaffect their information behavior. This need for convenience suggests the pressures of time felt by the

students and a need for a better articulation of the resources available to students at the library and theiroverall utility.

A large segment (572,509 in the 2003-2004 school year) of the total graduate student populationin the United States consists of international students, and this is the population Liao, Finn, & Lu (2007)

studied. They compared American-born students with international students using an online survey of315 students (91 international students) at Virginia Tech to uncover any differences in information

behavior that might be influenced by culture. This study was inspired due to the previous literature being

old (mostly mid-1990s or earlier, thus neglecting the role of the Internet), and identifying two problemsthat affect the information behavior of international students: the language barrier that studentsoriginating from outside the United States (with half or less of the comprehension ability of AmericanEnglish compared to American students) and the students own perception and experience of (the narrow

role of) libraries in their home country. This latter piece is reminiscent of the reason business studentsthat George et al. studied did not use the library, which was a lack of awareness of services offered.

Liao et al. divided information seeking behavior into three classes of action: initiating, searching,and locating. Under the action of initiating a search for information, Liao et al. report a statisticallysignificant difference between international students and American students, with the plurality of


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international students starting with the Internet, compared to the plurality of American students beginningwith Virginia Techs e-resources. Digging deeper, international students were more likely to search

online discussion forums, while Americans were more likely to use professional association websites.International students also search the Virginia Tech online catalog more than American students do.Lastly, international students report finding a resolution to their search in a print library book thanAmerican students did.

While the presumed barriers to library usage seem high, in fact it was discovered thatinternational students use the library more in graduate school than they did in undergraduate programs,while the opposite is true for American students. The results indicate, however, that international studentsfind library services to be new, while their American comrades do not, and international students onceaware are more likely to use the library services. A third of international students wanted help from thereference staff, while only 14.3% of Americans wanted such help, for instance. As to the language

barrier, Liao, Finn, & Lu found no statistical significance when comparing English language proficiency,time in the United States, and information-seeking behavior. This study raises the need to furtherunderstand why international students are more likely than American-born students to seek help fromlibrarians, as one of the consistent findings in this literature review is that American-born students rarely

seek out librarian help.Liao et al. discovered that international students are not averse to using the library and to using

the librarys staff during the information seeking process. International students tend to make more use ofthe library than domestic students do and do not, in fact, find library services difficult to use despite beingnew to them and despite the idea of the language barrier. Liao et al. found that the language barrier is less

severe than in the past, as more and more countries are preparing their students to study in America. Andof course, as expected, all graduate students prefer accessible and convenient resources. It is interestingto see that the Internet was not the first choice for Virginia Techs American graduate students. The

significance of this study is that international students are capable of being well-served by an academiclibrary, as long as they know what the library has to offer. This suggests a strong need for targeted

outreach in academic libraries serving international populations.

Sadler & Given (2007) applied the concept of affordance as described within the field

ecological psychology to the information behavior of eight (six were doctoral, two were masters) social

science graduate students at the University of Alberta. The premise is that a users behavior cannot bestudied in isolation from their environment, or world, which consists only of what the user perceives. Inthis premise, an affordance is opportunity for action offered by the users environment, which again, isonly characterized by the users perception of the environment. In essence then, the purpose of a thing as

intended by its creator is not relevant; all that matters is what the user thinks the purpose is. Thus for thisstudy, Sadler & Given wanted to explore the affordances within an academic library as perceived bygraduate students and compare them to the affordances perceived and/or intended by librarians.

During the analysis of data, each affordance was grouped into one of three categories: intendedand perceived, intended but not perceived, and perceived but not intended (intentions were based on

librarian responses, perceptions based on graduate students). Another way to describe results that fallunder the intended but not perceived category is an affordance gap. Intended and perceived affordancesincluded the library catalog, library databases, librarians as information sources, library as a place to

work, and journal articles and these resulted in high levels of satisfaction. Perceived but not intendedaffordances included informal relationships (friendships) with librarians as information source,unsanctioned (or even illegal) use of library resources, negative consequences of the dependence ontechnology, and the fear of missing deadlines because library resources take time.

The most interesting category is of course the affordance gaps, or the intended but not perceivedgroup. Use of library jargon can create confusion, while use of resource linking tools can cause studentsto only choose resources that can be had by clicking the Get it button. The most significant affordancegap was related to information literacy instruction, which is intended by librarians to be very extremelyuseful, but is not perceived by graduate students as such (most were not even aware of such sessions). In


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all of these cases, the problem seems to be one of communicating and explaining clearly the intent for useof the object in question. Ironically, librarians in this study intended to overcome this by broadcasting

news about things like the Get it button and information literacy sessions only through the library website.Graduate students simply did not see these announcements, nor did they see other potential services suchas recommending a book for purchase.

The study reveals that personal contact with librarians is the best channel for communicating

news, for information sources, and for re-aligning as needed the perceived but not intended actions of thegraduate students. This is possibly the first study of its kind in library and information science, and assuch, serves as more of a model for patterning future research into library services than at creating amodel to explain user behavior. For example, the question of whether or not information literacy sessionsimprove graduate-level student outcomes can be studied within the context of what is intended bylibrarians and what is perceived by graduate students.

Kayongo & Helm (2010) set out to find out how graduate students seek information in the contextof the University of Notre Dame (IN). Their primary focus was on how graduate students identify andacquire materials relevant to their research, and to understand how graduate students perceive the

helpfulness of the library system at Notre Dame. A unique aspect of this survey was its intention tounderstand how graduate students seek information on behalf of professors for whom they are research

assistants of some capacity. Kayongo & Helm received 920 completed responses to their survey, whichwas approximately half of the total non-law and non-business graduate students.

Kayongo & Helm found that graduate students do frequently use library resources in their

information behavior, however more than half of the students never accessed library resources on behalfof professors. Another finding consistent with other articles was that graduate students make infrequentuse of library staff, and in fact, a staggering 74.6% of Notre Dame graduate students did not make use of

the chat-based Ask-a-Librarian feature. The least likely way that Notre Dame students found a referencewas from a librarian, with the most likely means being database searching. In general, librarians were

much less important to graduate students than the library collection and related resources.Kayongo & Helm conclude with Harringtons claim that graduate students are hurting their

academic careers by not working with librarians, and like Harrington they offer no research or evidence

on this point at all. Their research is heavily focused on whether or not the University of Notre Dame

library system is meeting the needs of its graduate students, and based on the responses it seems that thecollection is but the staff is not. The methodology is questionable, as forcing the graduate students tochoose between subject and reference librarians is using a distinction not recognized well outside of LIS

professionals (jargon). Decisions like that undermine the research by confusing the participant and thus

the results. While focusing on user behavior in terms of improving services is important, the authors useof their online survey limited how the students could answer, and limited the effectiveness of the survey.As Sadler & Given argued, jargon is a kind of affordance gap that librarians must be aware of.

Khosrowjerdi & Iranshahi (2011) studied how prior knowledge affects graduate students

information behavior. Khosrowjerdi & Iranshahi define prior knowledge through three dimensions:familiarity, expertise, and past experience. Familiarity is defined as the time spent processing informationabout a particular subject, but can also include elements of awareness and perception. Expertise is the

ability to solve problems analytically. Experience includes the previous use or application of a product orservice. Previous research outside the realm of graduate students indicates that those with little priorknowledge, as evidence by the three dimensions noted above, will engage in more extensive and elaboratesearches for information compared to those with more prior knowledge. Khosrowjerdi and Iranshahi

hypothesized that there is a positive significant relationship between prior knowledge and the informationbehavior of graduate students, that there is a positive significant relationship between the dimensions ofprior knowledge and the dimensions of information behavior, and that there are differences between priorknowledge, information behavior, and gender.


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Defined as easier or faster searching, there is a positive and significant relationship betweeninformation behavior and prior knowledge. There are also positive and significant relationships between

the three dimensions of prior knowledge and the dimensions of information behavior that are calledrelevance judgment, generating new ideas, time as a barrier, effort to search information, and confirming

previous knowledge. However, they found negative relationships between all three dimensions of priorknowledge and time as a barrier and confirming previous knowledge. There was no significant difference

with gender as a variable. These results suggest that prior knowledge makes searching for informationeasier, as well as determining which resources are best to use and in an element of creativity. Priorknowledge did not appear to ameliorate the time crunch most graduate students feel, however, which

predicts the finding that even PhD students after three or more years still seek out convenient resourcesmore than any other, as Fleming-May & Yuro and Vezzosi show.

Williamson, Bernath, Wright, & Sullivan (2008) situate their study within the pace of change oftechnology as it relates to the information behavior of graduate students. They interviewed 15 graduatestudents (research students) from Australia to understand how the growth of electronic resourcesimpacted the students information behavior, specifically as it relates to knowing when to stop collecting

resources and how to manage collected resources.They found that students perceive library provided search tools to be less effective for them than

Google (or, less satisficing as in Prabha, Connaway, Olszewski, & Jenkins (2007)). Part of thisperception was apparently driven by a lack of awareness about the resources that the library provides.They also found that certain disciplines had certain preferences for the medium of the resources,

particularly in fields that valued that absolute latest research, which may only be available on websites.Students tended to mashup the various kinds of electronic resources, whether academic journals orwebsites, into a broad conception of online resources. Ultimately, the preference for online resources

once again came down to convenience.As for stopping their collection of resources or references, students relied on a deja vu

methodology; that is, when they felt they had read this or seen this before. They also waited for theirsupervisors to say thats enough. Some gave themselves deadlines or simply decided on their ownenough is enough. To manage these resources, more than half used some kind of reference management

tool, such as EndNote (reference management software), but some just tried to manage it in their heads.

At least one developed their own database to manage and analyze their research. The graduate studentswho did not use a system simply did not feel it was worth their time to learn any system like EndNote orZotero (a free reference manager).

While a strong preference for electronic resources was discovered, in this study students report

choosing the most appropriate resources for their needs, regardless of media. Williamson et al. posit thatthis kind of indiscrimination and indiscrimination in the quality of resources being used by the student

participants is related, suggesting that students do not consider that electronic resources might be of lesserquality than print. Although this presents perhaps more of a bias of the researcher (the assumption that

print resources are superior), it is an important idea to keep in mind. Williamson et al. conclude that

information literacy is essential to better equip students to be more discriminating, to better know when tostop, and to better manage their resources. However, graduate student research is haphazard (Barrett) andreciprocal (Liu & Yang) and a reliance on a research or academic advisor or supervisor to guide them in

finding and stopping research does not seem to this graduate student to be out-of-bounds to what agraduate course seeks to do.

Sloan & McPhee (2013) very recently undertook a series of interviews to understand how

masters and doctoral students make use of other people, how they find information, and the awareness oflibrary services and resources. As with many other studies, this one focuses on understanding the role oflibrarians and libraries in the process, as well as attempting to use the study to evaluate the effectivenessof library services. Graduate students tend to turn to other graduate students for routine questions, and toturn to faculty for research-related questions. There were several significant barriers to graduate students


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seeking help from librarians including not knowing what to ask or when to ask it, along with a desire forinstant help that was perceived to not exist. As expected, PhD students tended to seek less help, as could

be expected after the work by Kayongo & Helm and Liao et al., for instance. The graduate studentspreferred the Internet and resources that were accessed quickly. Given that this article has just beenpublished, this study suggests that the information behavior has changed little in the last decade since theInternet became ubiquitous in research and that libraries are struggling to find their place in the new

hierarchy of research tools and support.

Mixed Undergraduate and Graduate Students

Prabha, Connaway, Olszewski, & Jenkins (2007) were interested mainly in how users ofacademic libraries decide to end their search for information. In their terminology, this is called

satisficing which directly challenges the idea of exhaustive literature searches. It is a subjectivedecision on the part of the user that they are done with their research, or as in Williamson et al., on the

part of the research supervisor. The users studied consisted of faculty, graduate students, andundergraduate students. These participants were interviewed in focus group settings. The results of the

focus groups were unfortunately grouped by students (undergraduate and graduate) and faculty. It hasbeen shown that undergraduates behave differently than graduate students, and so it is important to keep

the groups distinct because of different goals. However, the student respondents did all focus on assignedresearch projects so perhaps the comparison is adequate.

As might be expected, students find themselves satisficed mostly when they are out of time on

their assignment, but also when they have met any minimum requirements of the assignment such as totalnumber of citations. Prabha et al. connect this result with the ideas of role theory and rational choicetheory. The role of students is to fulfill assignments, and thus their information behavior for an

assignment is driven by that role, which often includes page or reference requirements and a harddeadline. Thus students will stop looking for information when the deadline has arrived, when they have

met the minimum requirements or when they feel they can meet the page requirements with theinformation at hand. We see here the idea again of convenience and least effort. Rational choice theorysuggests that individuals will weigh all possible options and choose the one that is best for them. The

idea of satisficing contradicts this because satisficing is the idea of "good enough" based on limited or

imperfect information (options). In the information seeking process, role theory seems to be morepowerful influence because there is too much information and not enough time for students to truly userational choice. They can only use satisfactory choices.

Doctoral Students Only

Fleming-May & Yuro (2009) focused explicitly on doctoral students. All of the studies beforethis that are reviewed here collected data from masters and doctoral students. Fleming-May & Yurowork from the idea that a better understanding of the process of doctoral education is a factor in doctoral

students information behavior. As I have discussed, some researchers seem to not be aware of the ideaof deadlines on research project and thus the need for satisficing over exhaustively searching. This is

related to the suggestion by Barrett that librarians need to be aware of how graduate students information

needs, and thus behavior, will change over the course of their studies. Fleming-May & Yuro argue thatthe relatively few number of librarians practicing in academic libraries who hold an earned doctorate is areason that academic librarians do not well understand doctoral education, and thus PhD students andcandidates information needs.

The students responding in this study indicated that they felt transformed from theirundergraduate days, from generalist to specialist and from student to scholar. Because of their growingexpertise, in some ways, they may surpass what they perceive a subject librarian may be able to provide,and they instead seek assistance from colleagues, then some from faculty, and relatively little fromlibrarians. They also perceive seeking guidance on information literacy and showing a lack of research


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skill as beneath them. Another factor, as Liao et al. showed, is that international students have little to noconception of the role of the librarian that Americans do, and so they do not make use of librarians.

The survey of librarians revealed that while some institutions do profess to provide servicesspecifically for doctoral students, very few librarians are aware of them and very few of the services seemto mesh with what the research suggests is important to PhD students (bringing to mine the intended butnot perceived affordance gap). A consistent finding is the lack of awareness by PhD students of what the

library might do for them, just as there seems to be a lack of awareness on the part of librarians aboutwhat PhD students need. Very few students report being referred by faculty to a librarian; instead thelibrarian must become known to the students and make them aware of the resources available. Doctoralstudents feel the time crunch more than masters students and undergraduates, and so it is important thatservices be perceived as efficient. A final caveat about serving doctoral students is the possibility thattheir research will take them off-campus, and thus access to electronic resources become even more

important to them while they are away from campus.

Vezzosi (2009) studied of 18 doctoral students in biology in Italy and found that such studentsprefer the Internet, that people play an incredibly important role, and that doctoral students information

behavior progresses from their first year in the program until their final year. In fact, Vezzosi found thatthe Internet is not simply preferred in some instances; it is preferred in all instances. These students

preferred to start with Google for both their academic research and in their personal lives - most of thestudents even named Google in their responses. Vezzosi found that these students were aware of thedifferences in content and quality of resources on the Internet. Even for finding articles for their literature

reviews, six of the students reported using databases, while seven report preferring to start with GoogleScholar. As expected, this preference comes down to the perceived speed and ease of using Googlecompared to the perception of the databases as slow and clunky. Students do not feel it to be worthwhile

to take the time to learn to use the databases and non-Google like tools for research.While none of the students listed the library catalog as the first place to start a literature search,

the students did show a strong preference for browsing the physical collection and a strong appreciationfor serendipity. The students also had strong connections with other experts in Italy and around the worldand they use these experts in a way similar to serendipity. The students report that requesting information

or feedback from others often results in the other providing more than the original request, such as a tip to

another article to read. The doctoral students do seek help from librarians only as finders of hard-to-findarticles, and many stated that information literacy workshops would be helpful every year, even thoughthis tended to come from students in their last year who were looking back on their time.

Doctoral students, as expected by Barrett, are more advanced researchers than masters level

students and undergraduate students. In this sense, they are more like faculty, and thus academic librariesset up to support faculty may find themselves adequately equipped to support doctoral researchers.Vezzosisdoctoral students themselves finally admit they perceive the potential utility of informationliteracy workshops in the final years while looking back on their time. This can be explained by wishfulthinking that it might have saved them some time and anxiety as well as the utility of such workshops, so

without evidence it is an unreliable claim. Fleming-May & Yuro found a low percentage of doctoralstudents referred to a librarian by a faculty member suggesting that the lack of perceived value oflibrarians is not locked away solely in the minds of graduate students, but also exists in the mind of the

faculty members.

Conclusion

There are similarities across the disciplines of graduate level study, and even between mastersand doctoral levels. A repeated finding is how little graduate students turn to librarians for assistance intheir research. It is possible that graduate students are not fully aware of the resources and servicesavailable to them, since as the study of international students showed, the perception of the helpfulness oflibrarians can increase with targeted outreach. Many international students came from countries in which


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librarians are not much help at all, and yet after outreach were more likely to seek help than American-born students were. In general then, we can see with Sadler & Given an affordance gap - what librarians

intend with resources and services is not what graduate students perceive.Another common finding is the issue of using resources that are convenient. Surely the lack of

turning to librarians is part of this - getting onto campus and finding the librarian available is likelyperceived as inconvenient. However, as Kayongo & Helm found, it is not as simple as creating a chat

based reference service, as that service at Notre Dame was not used by nearly 75% of graduate students.Graduate students turn to other graduate students, their advisors, supervisors, and other faculty, andexperts outside their institution before they turn to a librarian, which suggests the issue is not simply anissue of convenience.

The issue of the convenience of resources also explains the preference for Google and otherInternet-based resources over physical holdings. Some students do still browse the shelves, but for

distance students and for PhD students away from their home institutions, browsing the shelves is notpossible and the importance of the Internet and of electronic resources becomes clear. In any case, overthe past 10 years of research it appears that the use of and preference for library provided electronicresources and Internet resources has become standard and entrenched. Libraries will need to find a way

to provide more access, and more convenient access, to their resources if they are to become more, andstay, relevant in graduate-level education.

A possible addition to library and information science education and training would be requiringmore research projects of the those studying to become librarians. Fleming-May & Yuro discovered thatlibrarians without PhDs dont fully understand the process of research at that level, but Harringtons

article also appears to not fully understand the process of masters level research projects, either. Thegoal should not be enforcing a model on graduate student behavior, but understanding what graduatestudents are doing, why it works well enough, and then how librarians can step in and make that better for

the students. Fleming-May & Yuro showed that graduate students are concerned about appearing to notunderstand the research process, so effective library-provided help would respect that concern by perhaps

tailoring information literacy sessions to the individuals existing behavior.Finally, it is clear that graduate students information behavior happens mainly without much

help or input from professional librarians. It could be driven simply by a lack of awareness, and thus

outreach may overcome this. It could be driven by graduate student anxiety over appearing behind in

their research skills. It could be that, as Barrett set out to determine, libraries simply arent set up to caterto the unique situation of graduate students, who sit on the fence between undergraduate students andfaculty, and exhibit qualities of both. But while they exhibit qualities of both, or perhaps because they do,libraries are not adequately meeting their information needs.


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References

Barrett, A. (2005). The information-seeking habits of graduate student researchers in the humanities. The

Journal of Academic Librarianship, 31(4), 324331.

Fleming-May, R., & Yuro, L. (2009). From student to scholar: the academic library and social sciences

PhD students transformation.portal: Libraries and the Academy, 9(2), 199221.

George, C. A., Bright, A., Hurlbert, T., Linke, E. C., St Clair, G., & Stein, J. (2006). Scholarly use of

information: graduate students information seeking behaviour.Information Research, 11(4).

Harrington, M. R. (2009). Information literacy and research-intensive graduate students: Enhancing the

role of research librarians.Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 28(4), 179201.

Kayongo, J., & Helm, C. (2010). Graduate students and the library. Reference & User Services Quarterly,

49(4), 341349.

Khosrowjerdi, M., & Iranshahi, M. (2011). Prior knowledge and information-seeking behavior of PhD

and MA students.Library & Information Science Research, 33(4), 331335.

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American graduate students: A user study at Virginia Tech 2005. College & Research Libraries,

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information sources: A user study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(1), 2435.

Prabha, C., Connaway, L. S., Olszewski, L., & Jenkins, L. R. (2007). What is enough? Satisficing

information needs.Journal of Documentation, 63(1), 7489.

Sadler, E. B., & Given, L. M. (2007). Affordance theory: a framework for graduate students information

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Vezzosi, M. (2009). Doctoral students information behaviour: an exploratory study at the University of

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The cross-disciplinary information behavior of graduate students: a literature review

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