Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Help Or Hype? Assessing Digital Literature Review Tools For Graduate Students, Jessica Hagman, Nikki Tummon, Catherine Bowers

Transforming Libraries for Graduate Students

A core role for academic librarians is to support early career researchers as they develop an increasingly focused understanding of the literature in their discipline and research area in order to contribute to the development of new knowledge. Graduate students use their knowledge of the literature to develop research questions and argue for the value of their work to the broader community of scholars.

This task is both intellectually and technically challenging. A dissertation or thesis requires that students demonstrate knowledge of their field as well as cite perhaps hundreds of sources. This process has long been supported by tools …