Information-Seeking Behavior of Undergraduate, Graduate, and Doctoral Students: A Survey of Istanbul University, Turkey - Challenges of Information Management Beyond the Cloud - page 130

of respondents (chi-square= 31.151, degrees of freedom: 3, p≤ 0.001). Of the
respondents, 70% who indicated they always or often sought help from academics
were postgraduates, whereas 22% of the respondents who indicated they rarely sought
help from academics were undergraduates.

Fig. 5. Asking for help or advice. Results are ranked from most frequent to least frequent used
people that students turn to for help or advice. Responses of “almost always” and “often” have
been combined.

Asking a classmate or friend for help with their research was the second most
popular choice among respondents; as expected, undergraduates tended to favor this
method more than postgraduates did. Survey data also showed that a large amount of
respondents excluded library staff from their research process: only 16% of the
respondents answered that they frequently use librarians. On the other hand, when
these responses were organized by academic level, it was observed that graduates
were more likely to consult library staff than postgraduates were. Seeing library staff
occupying such a limited role in students' research process is, of course, quite
discouraging. It was also interesting that some respondents preferred to ask for help or
advice from a family member than from an academic or librarian.

3.5 Evaluating Web Sources

The survey findings show that respondents often evaluate web content for course-related
research (Fig. 6). When evaluating web sources in the course of their research, the
majority of respondents ranked reliability as their main criterion (96.7%), followed by
currency at 90.2%, convenience at 79.7%, and format at 67.9%. Overall, these findings
suggest that respondents consider resource reliability and timeliness to be extremely
important, but convenience and format are nearly as important. When these criteria were
analyzed by discipline and academic level, no relationship with discipline could be
determined; however, it was found that undergraduates were more likely than
postgraduates to favor convenience above other criteria.