University of Southern Denmark
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
Jacobsen, Katrine; Drongstrup, Dorte; Holck, Jakob Povl; Jensen, Mogens Kragsig; Husen,Kamilla Jensen
Publication date:2021
Document version:Accepted manuscript
Citation for pulished version (APA):Jacobsen, K., Drongstrup, D., Holck, J. P., Jensen, M. K., & Husen, K. J. (2021). Reference practice in master’stheses across five different disciplines. Paper presented at QQML 2021, Athen, Greece.
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Download date: 03. Dec. 2021
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
1
Reference practice in master’s theses across five
different disciplines
Katrine Astrup Jacobsen1, Dorte Drongstrup1, Jakob Povl Holck1,
Mogens Kragsig Jensen1, Kamilla Jensen Husen1,2 1University Library of Southern Denmark 2Deparment for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark
Abstract: In the fall of 2018, a group of research librarians at the University Library of
Southern Denmark (SDUB) started a project examining the reference practice of master’s
students in five different disciplines across the university. The project was inspired by our
experiences helping and teaching students in finding literature and a similar project at the
Copenhagen University Library (Fajkovic, M. & Stensager, A. O. (2018)) and was
upscaled to five disciplines (Economics, History, Biology, Molecular Biology and
Software Engineering) with a sample of twenty theses from 2000 and twenty from 2013
in each discipline, in total 200 theses. Data were processed and coded to identify various
parameters such as type of publication and year of publication. Publication language was
added to each entry in the lists.
This paper will present the overall findings of the project and discuss some of the more
interesting results, such as the difference in the number of publications, and the use of
non-English-language publications. Another interesting parameter is the age of the
publications, which vary widely among the different disciplines. We have also noticed a
difference in the combinations of e.g. type and language from discipline to
discipline: History has a higher usage rate of different types of scholarly publications in
Danish and other non-English languages than for instance Molecular Biology, where the
references are almost exclusively scholarly journal articles in English. Another interesting
observation was the diversity in the students’ way of referencing – some excelled and
others did not. This finding points to the students’ general academic skills – some of which
are of interest for the libraries in developing new services and expanding the core services.
Now being able to prove that there is room for improvement, we plan to interact with the
teachers and supervisors on developing the students' skills in information retrieval and
referencing.
We will discuss our findings and reflect upon what the library can gain from studies like
this.
…………………………………………………………………………………
Keywords: reference practice, master’s students, master’s thesis, information literacy
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
2
1. Introduction When master students are creating reference lists for their theses, they are
influenced by the norms and values connected to their scientific disciplines (e.g.
Nguyen and Buckingham 2019): One discipline may prefer peer-reviewed
journal articles, another may favour monographs and anthologies. At one faculty,
10-year-old publications may be considered out of date, at another faculty there
is no limit concerning the age of the referenced works (e.g. Hunsucker 2011).
English may be the dominant language in one discipline’s references – in other
disciplines, the national language is more common.
At one subject area, there is a tradition for relatively lengthy publication lists, at
another subject area, references are almost non-existing. Of course, the
individual referential output in a master’s thesis (cf. Xie, Li et al. 2020) will
depend on multiple factors, e.g. the individual student’s understanding of, and
practical flair for, academic writing in general (e.g. Geng and Wharton 2019);
the research topic; and the university teachers’ and supervisors’ emphasis on a
specific reference standard or modus operandi, if any (e.g. Zheng, Yu et al. 2020;
Medaille, Beisler et al. 2021). In addition, one must consider the general, speedy
development in materials and resources available at the academic libraries (and
elsewhere) – with a growing number of online solutions (e.g. MacDonald 2016)
to find their way into the references. All of this contributes to a dynamic and
seemingly very complex process (cf. Badenhorst 2018b).
In this paper, we examine tendencies for the reference practice of five different
disciplines at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) (Economics, History,
Biology, Molecular Biology and Software Engineering). The dataset is based on
twenty SDU theses from 2000 and an additional twenty from 2013, sampled from each discipline from which the bibliographic information, e.g. the type of
publication, the year of publication, and the publication language were analyzed
for the references. The number of references per thesis has also been studied.
Our project is inspired by the paper “What a difference 15 years can make!” by
information specialists Anders Otte Stensager and Muhamed Fajković,
published in the journal of the Danish Research Library Organization, Revy
01/18. Stensager and Fajković based their paper on their own bibliometric
analysis report at Det Kgl. Bibliotek. which is, however, limited to selected
disciplines within the field of Humanities. With our selection of disciplines at
SDU, we hope to add numbers and observations to common conceptions on
faculty differences and characteristics beyond the Humanities – with the master
students’ reference practice as an indicator.
In the following, we present a selection of discipline-specific reference
characteristics, as found in our dataset, and discuss their implications and future
perspectives, not just for the academic disciplines in question but also for the
university library’s services. Is there something that we – as librarians – ought
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
3
to do differently? It is our day-to-day ambition to contribute to a sensible and
adequate information-seeking behaviour among the students, as early as
possible. Individual guidance is combined with courses for classes in an ongoing
dialogue with the faculty staff.
Concerning this endeavour, the overall experience is that “one size doesn’t fit
all”. By this, we mean that different disciplines demand a differentiated service
approach at the university library, whether we are talking about the library’s
accession of materials for professors and students – or the above-mentioned
tutorials and courses in advanced information searches, customized for the
university’s faculties.
Even though the library offers guided tours and courses for every new generation
of academics in spe, we find that master students, at an individual level, display
great differences concerning their academic writing skills and their proficiency
when it comes to the use of the library’s resources.
The diachronic element of our analysis is intended to shed some light on faculty-
specific changes in the reference patterns between the years 2000 and 2013. Our
sample size is relatively comparable with the sample sizes of similar analyses,
and it should provide clues as to the reference practice tendencies. With this case,
the dataset alone presents the foundation for our conclusions. A future follow-up
could include a survey among SDU faculty staff members and their master
students concerning the reference practice culture observed and promoted here.
2. Review of existing research – a selection International examples of discipline-specific analyses of master students’
reference and citation practice display a variety of differences when it comes to the investigators’ choice of faculty/faculties, the students’ country of origin, the
sample size (number of theses), the elements of bibliographic information
investigated, and the window of analysis or timespan of interest (Fuchs,
Thomsen et al. 2006, Feyereisen and Spoiden 2009, Sherriff 2010, Smyth 2011,
Bierman 2012, Becker and Chiware 2015, Condic 2015, Ahmadieh, Nalbandian
et al. 2016, Barnett-Ellis and Tang 2016).
Within the last three years, the peer-reviewed studies on master students’
reference practice, citations and general information-seeking behaviour etc. have
mainly been published in international journals on higher education (e.g.
Badenhorst 2018, Badenhorst 2019) and academic librarianship/information
science (e.g. Chiware and Becker 2018, Corrall and Jolly 2019), but also in
international journals on linguistics (e.g. Leijten, Van Waes et al. 2019, Liu and
Deng 2019), journals on collection management (e.g. Porter 2021) and journals
on scientometrics (e.g. Xie, Li et al. 2020) etc. The great variety of scholarly
journals interested in this field of study illustrates how reference list analyses are
deemed valuable in many types of research and may be turned into beneficial
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
4
feedback for the scientific disciplines, their institutions, and libraries (cf. Corrall
and Jolly 2019).
We argue that the key elements in, and prime advantages to our study, are: the
representation of five disciplines, which may enable the deduction of discipline-
specific patterns; the library-university-familiarity, which enables a feedback-
loop and ensures institutional development; quantitative and qualitative analysis
as a continuous means of enhancing library core services. A key element is also
the diachronic dimension of the study, enabling comparison between years.
At the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), no similar analysis in scale and
scope has been conducted before. We believe that our data collection and
subsequent analysis has demonstrated the necessity of this type of work and that
we may further explore the dataset.
3. Methods
Based on a discussion among the group members and a desire to examine
differences between the different areas, we chose the subjects of History,
Economics, Biology, Biomedicine & Molecular Biology and Software
Engineering. The years chosen were 2000 and 2013 - the year 2013 is the most recent year to
which we had access to data. We decided on 20 theses per year (2000/2013). If
the year had too many theses, we did a randomized selection, and if there were
too little, we expanded to years before and after. Every thesis was given an ID
consisting of Subject, Year and Number (example: Hist200001). The
abbreviations are as follows: “Hist” (History), “BMB” (Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology), “Øk” (Economics (økonomi in Danish)), “Bio” (Biology) and “MMMI” (Software engineering Maersk McKinney Møller Institute).
The theses were chosen from SDU Library’s catalogue. The selection was
challenged by the lack of metadata in the catalogue, and the subjects were,
therefore, broader than we initially hoped for, as the selection had to be made
from department names instead of subjects. This was the case for Biology,
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Economics. BMB theses carried out
in the university hospital were not possible to locate in the repository. The theses
from History were narrowed down to the field of contemporary history (20 th
Century history). Theses from Engineering focused on the field of software
engineering (from the Maersk McKinney Møller Institute).
As the subjects differentiate in the numbers of students, we experienced a similar
diversity in the number of theses. Some subsets were supplemented from years
before and after (Economics, BMB, Biology, and MMMI) and one was not
(History). Data from the university system counted more candidates than the
number of theses we found in the library catalogue, suggesting a lack of handing
in theses to the library repository.
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
5
The reference lists were scanned and imported from pdf to excel format with an
OCR processing to make data readable. This way it is possible to analyse on
different levels of the dataset, both individual subjects and overall, and to
differentiate between the years. Some data were difficult to read due to the use
of e.g. Cyrillic letters in the History theses and the use of specific fonts which
were difficult for the OCR to read. We did not do a full data cleaning on the
whole dataset, only enough to be able to identify the parameters we wanted to
examine first. The parameters we chose were: numbers of references per thesis;
type of publications (book, scholarly article etc. (Table 1); language of
reference/publication (not thesis language); year of publication.
A/V Dissertation / thesis Standards
Archival material Legal Unpublished material
Article, scholarly Newspaper Web source
Article, non-scholarly Patent Working paper
Book Press releases Other material
Book chapter Reference work Unknown
Conferences Report
Dataset Software
Table 1: Type of publications
Coding of type, year, and language was done manually by different persons for
each subject area. To make sure that the coding was reliable we chose to rate 100
references from each sample by another person to check interrater agreement.
For the Biology and BMB sets the agreement between the raters was very high
(93% and 97%), while the others were significantly lower (71%, 66% and 59%), probably because of the lack of subject knowledge in the second-rater. Data analysis was conducted in Excel.
4. Results
Number of references
The number of references varies considerably within the five chosen
disciplines (Figure 1). It shows that engineering students use considerably
fewer references than all other disciplines. Especially in comparison with
natural science, where engineering is using roughly 1/3 references fewer than
students in Biology (in 2000) and Molecular Biology.
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
6
Figure 1. Total references per subject/year. 200 master theses. N = 15978.
Note that the latter discipline uses by far the largest number of references in
the project.
All disciplines show a decreasing number of references in the two selected
years. From a reduction from minimum 6% (Software Engineering), between
12-18% for Molecular Biology, History and Economics, to 34% for Biology,
who shows the largest reduction. Consequently, the average number of
references per thesis shows a similar trend, i.e., a decrease from 88 (2000) to
71 (2013) references per thesis.
Reference age
The mean reference age has a considerable spread across the five disciplines
(Figure 2). Maybe not that surprising, the History students use significantly
older references (26 / 33,4 years). Thereby, they differ from the other four
1248
1030
2340
1529
2687
2362
720
672
1838
1552
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
References (no)
Subje
cts
Total references per subject/year. 200 theses
History 2013 History 2000 MMMI 2013
MMMI 2000 BMB 2013 BMB 2000
Biology 2013 Biology 2000 Economics 2013
Economics 2000
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
7
disciplines, which all remain within a range of 5,9-12,1 years (mean: 9
years). In the remaining group, the largest span lies between the engineering
students (5,9-7 years) who use the most recent literature and the Biology
students (11,8-12,1 years) who are using the oldest literature in the four
subject groups.
Figure 2. Mean vs. Median reference age/year. N = 14667.
Displaying the median versus the mean age (figure 2) shows that the mean
age (5,9-33,4 years) for all disciplines is larger than the median age (4-20
years). Because of that, a certain proportion of the used references is younger
than the mean may indicate. This is the case for all disciplines, with
engineering producing the lowest median age (4 and 4 years), and History
the highest (20 and 20 years). The difference between the mean/median age
also shows that the bulk of the references in the History theses are somewhat
younger than the mean may indicate. This is also to a smaller extent the case
for the Biology references. Both disciplines then differ from the other
subjects by operating with a significant but minor share of older references.
0 10 20 30 40
Economics 2000
Economics 2013
Biology 2000
Biology 2013
BMB 2000
BMB 2013
MMMI 2000
MMMI 2013
History 2000
History 2013
Mean vs. median age (years)
Median reference age Mean reference age
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
8
Language The type of language used in the references exemplifies the overwhelming
use of the English language in academia (Figure 3). This is the case in all
disciplines but one, namely History. Here, the preferred language is Danish,
which to some extent is due to the amount of special Danish topics in the
master theses.
Figure 3. Reference language. N = 15909.
Two other subjects, Economics and Biology, use the Danish language in a
minor part of their references, while Molecular Biology (BMB) uses English
in more than 90% of the references, as do Software Engineering (MMMI) in
all essentiality. Across the five disciplines, it is only History that has a
substantial multilingual approach, with references in German, Russian and
the Nordic languages as the most prominent (Figure 4). For all disciplines,
the use of ‘non-English’ languages has a distribution from the minimum of
0,5% (Molecular Biology 2000) up to 77.4% (History 2000).
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
Economics 2000
Economics 2013
Biology 2000
Biology 2013
BMB 2000
BMB 2013
MMMI 2000
MMMI 2013
History 2000
History 2013
References (no)
Reference language
Unknown Other languages Spanish
Russian Nordic excl. Finnish German
French English Danish
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
9
Figure 4. Relative distribution of reference language (% of total). N = 15909.
Types The five disciplines have a very different usage of reference types (Figure
5). Most conspicuous across the disciplines is the sovereign use of the
scholarly article (54,9%) and the book (14,9%), followed by the book chapter
(4,4%) report (4 %) and the archival material (3,6%). These five different
types cover 81,8% of the total, with minor usage of the remaining available
in 13 specified types (mean use 1,4%).
As it clearly shows, every discipline has its favourites. Biology and
Molecular Biology have a very high use of the scholarly article and very
limited use of other types (books, book chapters), but Molecular Biology
stands out even within those two with the highest use of the scholarly article.
History clearly uses the most different types of materials. Most concise is the
use of books followed by archival material and newspapers. Economics
prefer scholarly articles, books and reports, while Software Engineering
shows some diversity in preferring web sources and conference papers,
closely followed by scholarly articles.
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Economics 2000
Economics 2013
Biology 2000
Biology 2013
BMB 2000
BMB 2013
MMMI 2000
MMMI 2013
History 2000
History 2013
Relative distribution language (%)
Danish English French
German Nordic excl. Finnish Russian
Spanish Other languages Unknown
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
10
Figure 5. Reference type/discipline. (% of total). N = 15899.
5. Discussion
Before discussing the overall findings and the consequences of those, we would
like to add a few comments to the validity of our study. The most substantial
objection to the study could be our selection of subjects and the thesis sample
(number and year). The University of Southern Denmark has more than 70 BA
programmes and additional masters’ programmes spread out on five faculties of
Natural Science, Engineering, Humanities, Social Science and Health Science.
We wanted to look at different subjects with the expectation of noticing subject-
specific differences, but our selected subjects cannot be seen as representative
for each faculty.
A study like ours points in many different directions as seen in the Results
section. Many of the results are not in themselves surprising and they tend to
confirm our initial expectations, for instance, the higher use of references in
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Economics 2000
Economics 2013
Biology 2000
Biology 2013
BMB 2000
BMB 2013
MMMI 2000
MMMI 2013
History 2000
History 2013
Reference type/discipline (% of total)
Article, scholary Book Book chapter
Report Archival material Web source
Newspapers Conferences Other material
Article, non-scholary Working paper Legal
Dissertation/thesis Unpublished Dataset
Unknown Reference work Press releases
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
11
different languages in the History theses or the lack of other types but scholarly
articles in Molecular Biology (BMB). Nevertheless, we want to discuss some of
the significant findings in this section.
The first findings to be discussed is the number of references. There is a
considerable difference between the numbers of references in each subject with
Software Engineering (MMMI) at the bottom and Molecular Biology at the top.
One reason for this could be the Software Engineering’s origin as a technical and
more practice-oriented field emerging from the technical colleges with a less
scholarly approach to the genre of writing an (academic) assignment. The library
is also having difficulties in reaching out to the engineering students with our
courses in information literacy, as neither students nor teachers feel the need for
improving their skills. With this study, we might have a more bullet-proof
argument to make them consider our services. On the other hand, the numbers
of references in Molecular Biology are very high and it makes you wonder
whether the students actually read all the listed works. In Molecular Biology,
there are traditionally many references to facts, such as discoveries (e.g., genes
in organisms) and methods (e.g., determination of protein concentration). This
means that the references are not read from start to finish but more used as a
common basis like a reference work.
To continue with the engineering students, our data also shows a large difference
in the types of references used. It needs to be examined further, but the
engineering students tend to use less scholarly material like textbooks and
software manuals, while the students in Molecular Biology almost exclusively
use scholarly articles. Again, it points to the engineering students’ background
in a more practical field. Both Economics and Biology differentiate from the
others in the use of various materials like environmental reports, statistical
overviews, juridical sources (for both subjects) and other kinds of non-scholarly,
but still official and well-documented resources. What does it mean for the
library’s services? It means that when it comes to subjects like traditional
Biology and many of the social sciences subjects, we must be aware of the many
different sources and where to find them. You will not find an environmental
report if you only search the library’s extensive number of scholarly databases,
and likewise in the social sciences, where one might need to search different
governmental documents and reports to find the relevant resources. This points
to a need for a subject-specific insight among the library staff, indicating a
continuing need for subject specialists and not only generic library and
information-seeking skills.
The theses from History differentiate on almost every parameter: language, types
and age. This is not at all surprising, and the differences could have been even
bigger if we had not limited the sub-subject to 20th century history. The time span
is also the explanation for the diversity in language – the higher frequency of
Reference practice in master’s theses across five different disciplines
12
Russian is due to the research at SDU in the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and
if we expanded the time span to other areas such as ancient history both age and
language would have been even more diverse. The diversity in History points to
the self-image of the subject as a classical humanities subject where students are
expected to master more languages than English and their native tongue, and to
a continental scholarly tradition derived from the Humboldtian idea of a
university, where liberal education is the core part of the individual’s education.
Thus, History seems to have less need for the library’s services as long as we can
guarantee access to the materials.
6. Concluding remarks
In conclusion, this study shows a need for the library’s services and how the
library’s supportive role is quite diverse and at different levels. The knowledge
about the information needs of the subjects goes beyond the library’s own
collection and include both public resources and grey literature such as reports
from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and other authorities.
Many students and researchers might find information and reference skills quite
obsolete with all the possibilities for finding both information and programmes
for reference management. But we can conclude that these skills are not optimal
and support in this could ease and improve the process of the master thesis
writing, thus making our students more competent academics.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the rest of the project group at the University Library
of Southern Denmark: Anita L. Thiesen, Lone Bredahl, Lotte Thing Rasmussen, Lillian Svanekær Kudsk and Mette Bruus for their efforts in collecting and
coding the data and their overall participation in the project. We also wish to
thank Peter Jensen Husen for supporting the data analysis work.
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