Assessment of postgraduate digital research literacy: current competencies, desired skills, and enhancement strategies

The rapid development of digital technologies has driven the transformation of scientific research methods and created new requirements for researchers’ digital literacy. The cultivation of postgraduate students’ digital research literacy is thus of great significance for scientific research. This study aims to understand the current situation, improvement paths, and cultivation needs of digital research literacy among postgraduate students, and to provide suggestions for universities to develop relevant training programs. This study developed an evaluation scale, based on a survey of expert opinions, to assess graduate students’ digital research literacy. Online questionnaire data were collected from 314 master’s and doctoral students at H University in China. The digital research literacy scale demonstrated strong reliability and validity, as evidenced by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) results. Descriptive statistics and differential analysis were conducted on the survey data. The results show that the overall level of the postgraduate students’ digital research literacy was good, but there was still room for improvement. Autonomous learning and self-exploration were the main paths by which students were improving their digital research literacy. Meanwhile, the participants voiced a strong demand for courses and training from the university and for improvement in various dimensions of their digital research literacy. This study suggests that universities should build a targeted and systematic training system for postgraduate students’ digital research literacy, including increasing the supply of courses and training, enriching autonomous learning resources, carrying out targeted training based on group characteristics, providing guidance in the actual participation of research projects, strengthening the cultivation of online academic communication skills, and establishing a university-level digital research literacy support team.