Citation Analysis of Theses in Library and Information Science Submitted to University of Pune: A Pilot Study

Introduction Citation analysis is a worthwhile area of research. "Citation analysis" refers to references in one text to another text, with information on where that text can be found. Citation analysis is useful for understanding subject relationships, author effectiveness, publication trends, and so on. The first recorded citation analysis was Gross and Gross (1927) who looked at citation patterns to determine the journals to be subscribed to and back volumes to be acquired for the library of Pomona College. They studied the citation frequency in the references given in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (Amudhavalli 1997). With citation analysis one can evaluate and interpret citations received by articles, authors, institutions, and other indications of scientific activity (Ravichandra Rao 1993). Citation analysis is also a way to understand users. Studying references cited by your faculty's publications or your students' papers shows you the types of sources most commonly used and valued locally in their disciplines (Curtis 2005). It makes use of bibliographic references, which are an essential part of scientific communication (Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 1998). Citation analysis is a major area of bibliometric research, which uses various methods of citation analysis to establish relationships between authors or their work (Ane's Encyclopedic Dictionary of Library and Information Science, 2006). Objectives of the Study The study objectives are: * To determine the principal forms of literature used in dissertations by LIS doctoral students * To prepare a ranked list of periodicals based on frequency of use by doctoral students. * To determine country-wise distribution of literature used by doctoral students. * To determine the age distribution of literature used by doctoral students. * To study authorship patterns in citations. * To determine language-wise distribution of citations * To determine subject-wise distribution of citations. * To determine publisher-wise distribution of citations. Methodology Twenty-seven LIS dissertations submitted to the University of Pune between 1982 and 2005 were selected a source of data. A total of 6,257 citations were found in all 27 dissertations. Data compiled includes year of publication of articles, and journal subject, language of journal, publication status, place of publication, and publisher of the journal taken from the online version of Ulrich's International Periodical Directory (http://www.ulrichsweb.com/). All references (bibliographies) were photocopied and each reference was categorized according to format or genre, i.e., book, journal, report, conference proceedings, newspaper, thesis/dissertation, and reference book. A list of periodicals was compiled and data was entered in SPSS. Hypotheses PhD students prefer periodical literature as a source of information. PhD students give less importance to non-periodical forms of literature. PhD students prefer journals published in developed countries. Data Distribution of Physical Forms of Publication Table 1 summarizes the forms of publication cited. Table 1 shows that 2,639 (42.2%) citations out of 6,257 were from journals, followed by books with 1,950 (31.2%). Ranked List of Journals Journals are essential for research but their increasing cost demands that librarians study their quality, usefulness, and suitability to a particular group of users. The ranking list is a practical tool to help select journals of maximum utility in relation to their coverage of new and important literature in a particular subject area. The ranked list of journals in the field of LIS is presented in Table No 2. Journals cited more than twice appear in the table. …