Best Practice Example

Name: Dave Dettman
Title: Head of Instruction/Reference Librarian
Institution: UW-Green Bay
Street Address: 2420 Nicolet Drive
City/State/Zip: Green Bay, WII 54311
Phone: (920) 465-2388
Email: dettmand@uwgb.edu

Title of practice of implementation method: Deciding What to Read : Forward Citation Tracking

Primary Audience: seniors / beginning graduate students
Secondary Audience:

Describe the practice: As students progress in their academic careers and begin to focus on a discipline, it is important for them to have the skills to determine how any given article has, or has not, contributed to the discourse of the discipline in question. The Web of Science Online Databases is an excellant tool for demonstrating how forward citation tracking can help a researcher determine what is "the best" to read. During the first part of the class I demonstrate the skills they need to successfully interact with Web of Science and also spend a bit of time talking about scholarly communication and the advantages of being able to determine who are the key voices in a given discipline. For the second part of the session (I added this exercise this semester) I break the students into groups and assign each group two names. Their job is to use Web of Science to determine how influential each has been by doing forward citation tracking.

This session was developed in response to an assignment based on scholarly communication.

Competencies addressed through this practice:
9. Understand the structure of the information environment and the process by which both scholarly and popular information is produced, organized and disseminated.

 

Special Requirements: No.

References consulted: Handout created by Paula Ganyard

Would you provide the committee with a copy of any handouts? yes
Would you allow the committee to share this information on this web site and link to any online resources? yes