The Association of Vision Science Librarians' citation analysis of Duane's Clinical Ophthalmology.

The Association of Vision Science Librarians (AVSL) is always looking for tools to help members evaluate their collections so that they can determine if their acquisitions programs are well directed and well funded. Methods of collection evaluation can be broadly grouped into collection-centered and use-centered methods [1]. Although use statistics can be helpful guides for librarians in knowing what books to keep, it is hard to evaluate the quality of a collection through use alone. Therefore, a collection-centered method was sought as an additional way to evaluate the collections. In collection-centered evaluations, collections are often compared to an authoritative bibliography such as the “Brandon/Hill List of Print Books and Journals for the Small Medical Library” [2]. Although the AVSL has an Opening Day Book, Journal and A-V Collection: Vision Science [3] bibliographic tool, it is meant as a guide for a beginning collection and only contains materials that are currently available. Also, because the list is relatively small, a library could own most of the materials on the list yet still have an underfunded, underdeveloped library collection without a lot of depth. For these reasons, another evaluation tool in addition to the Opening Day Book, Journal and A-V Collection: Vision Science would be beneficial. It would also be useful to have a tool that would let libraries similar in size and scope compare themselves to each other. Nisonger suggested using citation-checking techniques as an evaluation tool for subject-specific libraries [4]. In his 1983 article, he used two groups of citations to compare for reliability. The first group of citations was selected from three years of a leading journal in the field with a random citation picked from each article. This sampling generated a group of 150 citations. The second group was selected from one volume each of five separate journal titles covering approximately the same year. A citation was selected randomly from each article in each journal title. This selection generated a group of 142 citations. Two samples from each source were taken to help test reliability. Each of the random lists was given to five libraries to see if the number of materials they held from the lists would rank them in similar order as to percentage of materials held. In his study, this citation method proved reliable, in both cases ranking the five libraries in the same order. Heidenwolf used Nisonger's technique to evaluate the Public Health Library collection at the University of Michigan [5]. Her sample size was 623 citations. She also cites Broadus and Mosher as proponents of citation checking as a means of collection evaluation. Citation checking is also described as one of the major methods of collection evaluation in the American Library Association Guidelines for Collection Development [6]. Although Nisonger and Heidenwolf used random citations from selected journal titles, Currie used bibliographies from textbooks to do his citation analysis [7]. The textbooks he used were required texts used by the faculty. In vision science, there is a comprehensive reference book called Duane's Clinical Ophthalmology [8]. It has seven volumes, including an index, and is updated yearly. Therefore, this reference book has a broader scope over many subfields of vision science and is more up-to-date than a regular textbook. A random list of citations from the end of each chapter in Duane's Clinical Opthalmology was made. The participating vision science libraries compared their collections to the list. A second random list was generated from the same book to see if the libraries would come out in relatively the same order for both comparisons. This second list helped determine consistency and increased the sample size.