The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the British Library have released a report titled “Researchers of Tomorrow: the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students”. According to the study, Generation Y students, born between 1983 and 1992, need more face-to-face and informal support tailored to their own subject to help them embrace open web technologies and social media fully.
The project spoke to 17,000 doctoral students over the course of its three year longitudinal study to set a benchmark for the research behaviour of the students. The final year of the study looked in detail at researchers’ use of social media applications within the research setting. It was found that, over the three-year period, there had been only a gradual increase in the use of social web and social media, which may seem surprising considering our increasingly digitalised culture.
Active take-up of institutionally-provided open web resources was also low, with students requesting more information about technologies and applications such as Google Scholar, cloud computing, EndNote and Mendeley.
Other findings from the report include a continuing lack of understanding about the nature of open access. Generation Y students felt that putting their own work out openly would bring them no positive benefits, and may even have a negative impact. Equally, doctoral students’ understanding of the intellectual property and copyright environment appeared to be a source of confusion, rather than an enabler of innovation. The debate about open access continues to be prominent in the media, and JISC and the British Library will continue to engage with researchers to ascertain how attitudes might be changing.
The study also highlighted a marked dependency on published secondary sources rather than primary sources, such as archival materials and data sets, as the basis of students’ own original research, regardless of discipline. This marks a significant change in the nature of doctoral research from only a decade ago, with potential significant implications for doctoral students’ experience of finding and using primary research sources.
