Research Material Selection in the pre-web and post-web Environments: An Interdisciplinary Study of Bibliographic Citations in Doctoral Dissertations

Information use patterns by doctoral students are studied for selected years in the pre-web (1990–1993) and post-web (2003–2006) time periods. Over 55,000 citations from dissertations in ten disciplines were analyzed. The results show that there was some increase in journal use in most of the disciplines in the post-web era, and that the use of monographs, dissertations, and technical reports declined over the period of the study.