The (Mis)match of a university-wide library program for PhD-students to students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Abstract

The project «Information Management for Knowledge Creation» has resulted in a report: «PhD candidates and the research process. The library's contribution» (Gullbekk et al 2013) and a net based resource: PhD-on-track; phdontrack.net. The web resource PhD-on-track contains three main parts: "Review and discover"; "Share and publish" and "Evaluation and ranking". Each of the main parts focuses on a different quality of the research processes of young scholars. PhD-on-track seems to have a strong bias towards PhD-thesis in the form of a collection of published journal articles. However, in Norway, the format of PhDs may be as monograph, or as published articles with a summary. There are different preferences from the different faculties. In this paper the authors will look closer at and evaluate how helpful the web resource will be for PhD students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. During the period 01 January 2008 - 31 December 2013 124 students at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Bergen, defended their PhD dissertations. Of these 112 persons defended PhD monographs, while the 12 others defended article-based dissertations. One of the main questions of this paper is how the web resource PhD-on-track can be a useful tool both for article-based doctoral dissertations and for PhD monographs.