Are math grad students increasingly consulting SE and Wiki, ignoring research librarians and libraries, to their own detriment?

Question

Judging by posts and comments by graduate students in math.stackexchange.com and mathoverflow.net, I have come to the conclusion that a large part of their knowledge comes from SE sites and the Wikipedia, as opposed to traditional publications such as books and papers.

I was deeply shocked the first time I heard of a student researching the literature through Google, which spits out at least as many SE and Wikipedia answers as references to books and journals. But, of course, nowadays I do the same, certainly more often than going to the library!

Are traditional publication forms becoming obsolete, in the face of purely electronic forms? Or, contrariwise, do younger people who ignore traditional forms miss out on essential information?

Answer 1

I think wikipedia is good for mathematics topics that are fairly settled. There are few errors and the ones that do appear (I've found some) tend to disappear quickly. You can get a good overview and if you follow up on the sources provided you can get a more complete view. So, I hope students use this for background on things they need to study.

But, by its nature, it is less useful to bring you to the state of the art: stuff that isn't yet "settled".

I think SE is the opposite, in some ways. You might find answers to contemporary questions, but the sources may be less reliable. Wikipedia has many editors (formal and informal) keeping things right, SE, less so and not everyone commenting really has a good answer. So, again, I hope that grad students use it when necessary, but with caution.

If the alternative is to set for ten hours at a time in a library, pulling older and older books from the shelves, it is no contest.

But reading things and being given answers isn't the best way to gaining insight into a mathematics problem. Not deep insight, anyway. For that you need to do some work yourself.

And, as you say yourself, it is a professional approach to use such resources. You do it yourself. And, I would say "to the detriment", actually. It is a supplement and/or a place to start.

Answer 2

I don't have any empirical evidence to contribute relating to use of SE and Wikipedia versus traditional literature searches. However, they all have a reasonable place in academic work when used properly (i.e., in conjunction and with care). The advantage of SE and Wikipedia is that it often allows you to rapidly find details on the problem you are looking at, without necessarily knowing the name of that problem in advance. In the latter case there is also usually citation to some basic literature on the problem that can act as a starting point for a more traditional literature search. In largely non-politicised fields (e.g., mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.) the answers on Wikipedia are usually quite reliable and well-crafted, and there is usually good referencing to some basic peer-reviewed literature.

Of course, if grad-students rely solely on SE and Wikipedia, and fail to follow this up with adequate searches of scholarly databases then this will very likely miss out on important information and references. I would think that this would be easy to spot in their research work --- e.g., by a paucity of references on a topic or failure to understand the full context of their work. This is something that good supervisors can provide guidance on, to assist the student to rapidly find material when needed, but also follow this up with in-depth research on a topic.

Traditional academic publications are all moving online/have moved online, so you would usually just search and download papers from your office now (through online subscription services with academic publishers) rather than "going to the library". Occasionally you will have to go to the university library for books, etc., that are not available online, but often you can do most of the literature search from your computer. Consequently, while the journals themselves are not becoming obsolete, printed copies of the journals are becoming rarer and foot-traffic in the library is probably also reduced.