Re: question about references

[Robert Herdegen]

>Those of you who assign research papers: What do you do if you are at an
>institution that has a poor library, which causes students to have
>difficulty finding sources? Interlibrary loan services typically take too
>long if a paper is to be completed during the same semester it is assigned.
>Some possible solutions are: a) allow the use of secondary sources or b)
>allow students to cite papers after calling up the abstracts on Psychinfo
>(without seeing the paper itself). I don't want to teach students that this
>is an appropriate way to do research. How have others dealt with this
>problem?
>
>Marty Bourgeois
>University of Wyoming

My experience is that interlibrary loan (ILL) typically takes 1-2 weeks, maximum, for virtually all journal articles, even from obscure journals. If the students get started early enough on the topic there should be sufficient time to get, read, and digest the articles for inclusion in a paper. We are in the position of having a small library, which simply cannot afford to carry all the journals that students may have need to consult, and as a result we have to rely on ILL rather heavily. On the other hand, we have within a 1 1/4 hour drive two large public universities, a couple of smaller private universities, and 8 (or more?) small colleges. Many of our students figure the way to get journal articles is to road-trip to these other campuses. I tend to discourage this as a routine matter, because if left to their own devices they waste more time than they spend in productive work. (Of course, using the library may not the principal reason they want to go to these other campuses.) Also, they often get articles through ILL faster than the do if they plan go to University X (for example), because they wait until Saturday to make the trip, then don't manage to get there on Saturday, and then have to wait around another week to go, and may or may not get around to going that next weekend, etc., etc. In any event, I try to make paper assignments early enough in the semester to allow plenty of time to get the articles they need, and then practically insist that they use ILL to get articles that we don't have on campus.

With respect to (a) and (b), I occasionally allow secondary citations if there is a legitimate problem getting access to the original source. I pretty much forbid using only the abstract as a resource, as there simply isn't enough information to say anything meaningful about a topic contained within it.

Good luck!

Bob

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Robert T. Herdegen III
Department of Psychology
Hampden-Sydney College
Hampden-Sydney, VA 23943
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