Citation Practices in Final Year Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Bachelor Theses

Abstract

This study investigates the citation practices of electrical engineering (EE) and computer science (CS) bachelor students. A citation category based coding scheme for content analysis was developed to study the academic writing genre, represented by final year thesis reports. The academic writing skill-set displayed by CS and EE bachelor students was gauged by interpretative content analysis of a corpus of full-text theses, retrieved from a university repository. Two research questions were addressed: 1) what are the citation practices, employed by two cohorts of final year bachelor students, in electrical engineering and computer science? 2) what use of academic writing genre conventions can be quantified through interpretative content analysis? The intention of the study was to categorize the purposes behind citation use in bachelor level theses. Both student cohorts displayed an exaggerated use of citations, deviating from fully mature academic writing practices in the CS and EE fields. Many factual statements of a general nature were supported by multiple and weakly motivated instances of citations to a limited set of sources. An apparent genre convention was to cite sources mainly in text segments of introductory or survey character. Hence the investigated bachelor level theses made little use of citations to support the choice of research question, method or in critical discussion of results.