Assessing electronic resource searching competency among postgraduate students

Purpose This study evaluated electronic resource searching competency among postgraduate students (PGS). Specifically, the study intended to identify online search strategies used by PGS in searching electronic resources, examine the mechanisms used by PGS to access electronic resources and identify the challenges faced by PGS when searching electronic resources. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was administered to 70 PGS who attended a training workshop on scholarly literature searching. A pre- and post-training assessment was carried out to establish their competence prior to and after the training. Findings The results show that during the preassessment, the majority of respondents indicated Google search and Google Scholar search engines were their primary sources of scholarly literature, and the majority used simple search strategies to locate scholarly literature. The results further show that, before the training, it was revealed that 50.5% of the PGS had never used subscribed databases such as EBSCOhost, Emeralds, Taylor and Francis, Wiley online library and Springer. After the post-training assessment, results indicated an increased level of using new techniques such as Boolean operation, phrase searches, truncations, search limit and subject directories. Access through local IP addresses was highly used compared to other mechanisms such as remote access authentication methods or discovery services. Students’ exposure to new strategies and search tools had significant improvement in searching scholarly literature. Originality/value This paper is the researcher’s original study and it has not been conducted before. The paper represents a true analysis of the search capability of postgraduates in areas of research.