That's an interesting question, and definitely one I hadn't considered.
The answer is...I don't know. It's nice in some ways to be able to go to the university library and pull physical journals off shelves (I like physical books a lot), but on the other hand those journal bind-ups get heavy really quickly, and when I was doing my undergrad I was using just as many journals that we didn't subscribe to and I could only get through databases--in fact the majority of my sources came from journal databases, I'd say. I don't know whether I ever thought the one was any more authoritative than the other.
Given what I've heard about the propensity of the undergraduate population as a whole to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source, though, I'm not sure the two pop up in people's minds separately. It'd be really interesting to survey students on this question!
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sarken
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-23 23:29 (UTC)The answer is...I don't know. It's nice in some ways to be able to go to the university library and pull physical journals off shelves (I like physical books a lot), but on the other hand those journal bind-ups get heavy really quickly, and when I was doing my undergrad I was using just as many journals that we didn't subscribe to and I could only get through databases--in fact the majority of my sources came from journal databases, I'd say. I don't know whether I ever thought the one was any more authoritative than the other.
Given what I've heard about the propensity of the undergraduate population as a whole to cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source, though, I'm not sure the two pop up in people's minds separately. It'd be really interesting to survey students on this question!