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Students are using the Internet - and more specifically web search engines - as their primary (sometimes only) means of gathering information Yet estimates indicate that even the best search engine can only reach about 25% of the material on the world wide web. Included in what is often missed is that which you expect students to use - articles from peer-reviewed journals and books published by scholarly presses and associations.

Anecdotal evidence abounds, but here are some recent research findings.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed 754 12-17 year old students with home internet access in November-December 2000 and found that:

94% use the Internet for homework. 71% "used the internet as the major source for their most recent major school project or report." 24% "used the library as the major source for their most recent major school project or report."

The Internet and Education, Findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Researchers at Cornell did a comparative analysis of the bibliographies of undergraduate research papers in Econ 101, Introduction to Microeconomics, a class that is taken by over 300 students per year, in 1996 and 1999, a period of rapid increase in internet use, concluding that there has been a significant decrease in the frequency with which scholarly resources are cited. They found that:

• book citations decreased from 30% to 19%
• newspaper citations increased from 7% to 19%
• Internet citations increased from 9% to 21%

Davis, Philip M. and Suzanne A. Cohen. "The Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior 1996-1999." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology v. 52 no4 (Feb. 15 2001) p. 309-14

A survey of 1,050 18-24 year old college students commissioned by the Online College Library Association (OCLC) found that

96% of those surveyed used web search engines for at least some of their assignments - 79% for most of them

"Nearly two-thirds strongly feel they know best what information to accept from the web. Only 4 percent think the quality of information they find is not good enough for their assignments"

OCLC White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students, June, 2002

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