The citation behaviours and the academic performance of first-year Political Science students

Abstract

This research will utilise citation analysis to explore the information behaviours of a cohort of first-year Political Science students at a university in the UK. Using a dataset of the citation behaviour of 262 students, we find that students who locate and cite particular sources of information receive better grades than those that do not. These findings suggest that students who know how to locate and subsequently cite these sources—which tend to be those regarded as more reliable and of higher quality—will achieve higher grades on their course work. This might sound obvious, but such assumptions are rarely checked; furthermore, such findings might convince doubtful students—and staff—to take information literacy more seriously.