Library Tech Confidential

Sharing Study [OCLC] : “OCLC, the world’s largest library research and service organization, has released the third in a series of reports that scan the information landscape to provide data, analyses and opinions about users’ behaviors and expectations in today’s networked world.” (via)

The Canadian Library Association recently congratulated the Canadian Institutes of Health Research on the announcement of their Policy on Access to Research Outputs, the preamble to which reads:

“As a publicly funded organization, CIHR has a fundamental interest in ensuring that the findings that result from the research it funds, including research publications and publication-related data, are available to the widest possible audience, and at the earliest possible opportunity.”

So, publishing the results of a CIHR-funded study in an obscure, print-only journal to which no Canadian research library subscribes and which is published on the other side of the world in a foreign language would be a less than ideal way to quickly and efficiently disseminate new knowledge arrived at thanks in whole or in part to the public purse.

Silly hypotheticals aside, what effect will this policy actually have?

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From Waytowitch et al., “Characteristics of Doctoral Students who Commit Citation Errors“, Library Review 55(3), 195-208:

[G]raduate students with relatively high levels of self-oriented perfectionism and other-oriented perfectionism tended to commit the most citation errors and construct reference lists that departed the furthest from the citation style stipulations. Participants’ dissertation proposals, on average, contained more than 12 missing or inconsistent citations. This indicated that for every three citations included, one of them represented some type of error. Regression analyses revealed that: students with the lowest expectation levels tended to commit the highest rate of citation errors; and students who have taken the most courses in their graduate programs tended to recieve the lowest scores pertaining to the quality of reference lists.

Tags: Citation, dissertation, error.