Adoption of Scholarly Databases in a Developing Country

Adoption of Scholarly Databases in a Developing Country

Foluke Okocha
Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/IJDLDC.2021100102
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Abstract

The study revealed that awareness and acceptance of scholarly databases by undergraduates is still relatively low in Nigeria. Three hundred questionnaires were distributed exploring perceptions of students. Descriptive analysis, one-way ANOVA, and cross-tabulation were carried out in the analysis of data using statistical package for social science (SPSS) software. Science Direct was revealed to be the preferred scholarly database of students with the highest satisfaction level. Findings showed that Agora and Teal were used by agricultural sciences while JSTOR and Ebrary were used more by business and social sciences. However, factors that limited acceptance were challenges of information retrieval skills and student preferred interest for general search engines persist. Undergraduate students were also noted to be more interested in the relevance of the information source than the currency and authority and accuracy of the source. There is a need to improve the information literacy skills and the information retrieval skills of undergraduate students.
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Problem Statement

The information literacy skills of undergraduate students have raised serious concern among researchers globally (Okeji, Ilika & Baro, 2020; Xu & Du, 2019; Adeniran, 2018; Connaway, Lanclos, & Hood, 2013; Catalano, 2013). Undergraduate students have continually shown preference for convenience amongst other evaluation criteria when conducting an information search and continually fall prey of predatory journals (Okocha and Owolabi, 2020). In Nigeria, findings by Okeji, Ilika & Baro (2020) revealed that final year undergraduate students show preference for journal articles and internet information over scholarly databases through rating their information literacy skills as moderate which further corroborates a study by Adeniran (2018), that a positive correlation exists between information literacy and the use of scholarly databases. However, though several studies have examined the usage of scholarly databases by undergraduate students, only few have focused on examining students’ satisfaction in relation to their evaluation criteria on each of the specified scholarly databases. It is important to know how students evaluate scholarly databases as Liyana and Noorhidawati (2014) reported that students who are interested in convenience usually resort to search engines as their first choice. Hence this study seeks to understand the undergraduate students’ satisfaction with scholarly databases and further evaluate these databases based on specific evaluation criteria.

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