The Duale Hochschule has published this guideline (German) (this question might be specific to the studies in Germany) and it does quite a good job explaining how literature shall be cited and put into a bibliography.
Now, in the evaluation sheet for the paper and thesis, literature research is mainly judged by its academic character, i.e. it should be primary sources, qualified links etc. I'm fine with that as well. My students should try to find and understand primary literature.
However, here's a caveat: the studies is Informatics. When they implement an application, the students use software libraries. Personally, I'd like to know the sources of those libraries, because some of them are not unique by their name.
I can understand that the students don't want to put them into bibliography, because they might not be scientific or academic, they are just a tool. However, there are sentences like
To get around problem X, I use library Y.
IMHO, such decisions are ok, they don't require special research. Other researchers may simply use a tool ("hammer") to solve a problem without thinking much about it as well. Not mentioning such a library fix would leave others in a situation where the paper is not helpful.
How to deal with that situation and why?
Should the software libraries
- be part of the bibliography,
- get their separate list of "software" references,
- just be mentioned in a footnote when the library name first occurs,
- not be mentioned at all
- ...