The use of scientific information for postgraduate dissertations at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Marília, Brazil)

Abstract

The goal of this essay is to verify the impact of the behavior of the seeking and use of the information identified in prior researches in dissertations produced in the four post-graduation programs from UNESP, Marília Campus, in the last five years; to identify the sources reported by the post-graduand in their dissertations and to raise subsidies to characterize the behavior of the information use of the post-graduation students from UNESP/Marília and to compare the found results with the literature about this subject, in special those focused in human and social sciences. The accomplishment of this paper was based in analysis of the citations from a proportional sample of the dissertations produced in the last five years (2001-2005) in the four post-graduation programs from UNESP Marília: Social Science, Information Science, Philosophy and Education. Dissertations were selected by an aleatory sortition. The references of each selected paper were analyzed as for the kind of source that it refers to, support (printed or electronic), language and average of the reported sources by the dissertations. After that, a comparative study was done with the indicators that suggests, in different scientific areas, the most used sources in areas focused in the research. The results show that the post-graduand from UNESP/Marília prefer monographs (books, thesis and dissertations) as information source to theirs researches, and there is a predominance of printed sources, although the University offers the access to varied sources of on-line scientific information. The results confirm the tendency of the information use, that is, the use of printed sources as in a book, in human area. Although we could see some particularities in the different areas, all of them follow traditional standard of information use.