October 31, 1997

How Students Get Lost in Cyberspace

By STEVEN R. KNOWLTON

hen Adam Pasick, a political science major at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, started working on his senior honors thesis this fall, he began where the nation's more than 14 million college students increasingly do: not at the campus library, but at his computer terminal.

As he roamed the World Wide Web, he found journal articles, abstracts, indexes and other pieces of useful information. But it wasn't until he sought help from his professor, Charles H. Franklin, that he found the mother lode.

Franklin steered Pasick to thousands of pages of raw data of a long-term study of political attitudes, information crucial to Pasick's inquiry into how family structure affects political thinking.

The Web site containing all this data is no secret to political scientists, Dr. Franklin said, but can be hard for students to find.

"It is barely possible that if you did a Web search, you would show it up," he said. "Whether the average undergraduate could is another question." It would be even harder for the uninitiated to find their way around the site, he said. "One of the things you're missing on the Web is a reference librarian."

It is just such difficulties that worry many educators. They are concerned that the Internet makes readily available so much information, much of it unreliable, that students think research is far easier than it really is. As a result, educators say, students are producing superficial research papers, full of data -- some of it suspect -- and little thought. Many of the best sources on the Web are hard to find with conventional search engines or make their information available only at a steep price, which is usually borne by universities that pay annual fees for access to the data.

Pasick, 21, of Ann Arbor, Mich., whose conversation is filled with computer and Web search terms, admits that he would have never found the site, much less the data, on his own.

"All the search engines are so imprecise," Pasick said. "Whenever I have tried to find something precise that I was reasonably sure is out there, I have had trouble."

Dr. David B. Rothenberg, a philosophy professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, said his students' papers had declined in quality since they began using the Web for research.

"There are these strange references that don't quite connect," he said. "There's not much sense of intelligence. We're indexing, but we're not thinking about things."

One way to improve the quality of students' research is to insist that students be more thorough, said Elliot King, a professor of mass communication at Loyola College of Maryland and author of "The Online Student," a textbook for on-line searching.

"Because information is so accessible, students stop far too quickly," he said. If a research paper should have 15 sources, he said, the professor should insist students find, say, 50 sources and use the best 15. When King assigns research papers in his own classes, he insists that students submit all the sources they did not use, along with those they finally selected.

The jumble in Web-based student papers mirrors the information jumble that is found on line, said Gerald M. Santoro, the lead research programmer at the Pennsylvania State University's Center for Academic Computing in State College, Pa.

The Internet, he said, is commonly thought of as a library, although a poorly catalogued one, given the limitations of the search engines available. But he prefers another analogy.

"In fact, it is like a bookstore," Santoro said, explaining that Web sites exist because someone wants them there, not because any independent judge has determined them worthy of inclusion.

Dr. William Miller, dean of libraries at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, and the immediate past president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, cautioned that free Web sites were often constructed "because somebody has an ax to grind or a company wants to crow about its own products." And he said that the creators of many sites neglect to keep them up to date, so much information on the Web may be obsolete.

"For the average person looking for what is the cheapest flight to Chicago this weekend, or what is the weather like in Brazil, the Web is good," Miller said. But much of its material, he added, is simply not useful to scholars.

Yet despite the Web's limitations, educators like King still see it as a way to "blast your way out of the limitations of your own library."

Some of the most valuable information comes from home pages set up by the government and universities. One example, said King, was research conducted by a student trying to find information on cuts in financing for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The relevant books in the college's library were few and outdated, he said, but, with his help, the student found full texts of Congressional hearings about public broadcasting's budget.

"Her essay no longer consisted of relying on books or magazines," he said, "but in getting raw data on which the books and magazines are based."

On the Web, students can also find electronic versions of the most popular academic journals, the mainstay of research for faculty and advanced students. Most university libraries now have electronic subscriptions to a few hundred journals. Miller warned, however, that while that may be a tenth of the journals in the library of a small liberal arts college, it is a tiny fraction of the journals subscribed to by a large research university, which may order more than 100,000. The trend is clearly toward electronic versions of academic journals, he added, but most are still not on line and the ones that are tend to be expensive. On-line subscriptions, for instance, can often run into thousands of dollars a year.

The time will surely come, Miller said, when most academic journals are on line, "but you'll need either a credit card number or a password" from an institution that has bought an electronic subscription. "And if you don't have one or the other, you won't get in," he said.

When Pasick turned to Franklin for help, the professor's expertise was only one of the necessary ingredients for success. The other was the University of Wisconsin's access to the Web site, as one of 450 research institutions that pay up to $10,000 a year for the privilege. (The site is operated by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu.)

Even at an institution with the resources to take full advantage of cyberspace, there are some forms of assistance that the Web will never provide, some educators say.

Santoro describes academic research as a three-step process: finding the relevant information, assessing the quality of that information and then using that information "either to try to conclude something, to uncover something, to prove something or to argue something." At its best, he explained, the Internet, like a library, provides only data.

In the research process, he said, "the Internet mainly is only useful for that first part, and also a little bit for the second. It is not useful at all in the third."

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