The larger objective is to influence increased bibliographic access to the core literature. This paper introduces the Project for Mapping the Literature of Allied Health and the common bibliometric methodology used for the five specific studies reported in the accompanying papers. Findings relating to format used, age of citations, dispersion of literature, and indexing coverage for the different fields are compared.
Journals are the most heavily cited format.
Fields differ by the currency of cited material, with physical therapy and speech language pathology displaying use of the oldest citations. The set of core journals is small for each field, particularly in speech-language pathology. Information such as that reported by the project can help librarians in improving information transfer for the allied health professionals they serve. Chair, Task Force on Bibliographic Access for the Allied Health Literature, Medical Library Association Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section.