Library Research S-U-C-K-S...

If there is one big thing I have taken away from my almost complete MLIS degree, it is that library research is absolutely THE WORST.

It is completely ironic and sad.  Librarians claim to be "information professionals" but yet as an MLIS student I have come across lackluster, half-assed, and erroneous articles.  Librarians are always talking about how important it is to check your citations and sources.   So when it comes to disappointing library research, I am fairly certain that I am not the only one to realize this.  Just this week, several students held presentations on various library related topics and they all mentioned how bad the so-called "Peer-Reviewed" articles they read were. 

I have heard that some academic librarians are required to conduct research and publish like other professors.  A lot of their articles seem rushed and as though they were just published just for the sake of saying the author bragging that they are published.  It is not just articles from fully-fledged librarians either.  My school's list-serve is constantly bombarded with requests from professors for students to submit articles for so and so organization.  Let me keep it real, I have done group work with these individuals and I cannot for the life of me understand how some of them have come this far in life with such horrible writing skills.  It's bad enough I have to wade through these crap-tastic articles from librarians, I'd rather not risk information BS overload with MLIS students' work. 

The research is so bad, but it's worse when every other article cites the next crap one.  Oh, and heaven help them if there are any numbers/statistics involved.  If you are going to publish an article based on a survey, you have to have an adequate amount of respondents to make sure the population is properly represented --- Survey Errors 101.  I bet that if I wrote an article about how bad library related articles were, it would get published and circulate just as well as the others.