Informational challenges for doctoral students in medicine in Burkina Faso

This research examines how doctoral students in medicine search for the information they need to complete their thesis. A questionnaire and semi-directed interviews were used to collect data from doctoral students in medicine at the Health Sciences Training and Research Unit in Burkina Faso. Analysis of the results indicates that digital resources are more used than printed ones. The most important barriers for students are: direct costs for accessing information, that is, the fees required to order scientific articles (economical barriers); power cuts, unstable Internet connections and limited resources in university libraries (environmental barriers); time constraints (situational barriers); scarcity of scientific medical literature in French and of reports on research conducted in Africa (barriers related to source characteristics). Our results show, however, thanks to their resourcefulness and creativity, that students find strategies to overcome some of these barriers.