Search results

The study aims to divulge the patterns of scholarly communication of The Electronic Library from 2003 to 2009 and to measure the coverage and quality of contributions of this journal towards LIS literature.

Seven volumes of The Electronic Library (TEL) published during the years 2003‐2009 collected from Emerald Management Xtra, that constituted 42 issues and a total number of 417 articles carrying 7,442 citations, have been taken up for the analysis. The study analyzes bibliographical forms, types of articles, authorship pattern, geographical distribution of contributors, chronological distribution of citations, length of articles, and ranking of journals. The study employs Bradford's Law of Scattering.

The majority of articles published in TEL fall under the category of research papers, followed by case studies, and general reviews. Regarding the bibliographical distribution of citations, it is found that the majority of citations are from journals, followed by web resources and books. The study further reveals that the average length of articles is 13.017 pages and the scattering of contributors is limited within a few countries.

The paper is relevant and useful to those who are interested in bibliometrics and it provides a comprehensive study of scholarly communication of The Electronic Library from 2003‐2009 for comprehending essential publishing traits of this journal during the stated period.

This paper aims to examine the scholarly communications in Library Review (LR) from 2007 to 2011 and to reveal key aspects of its publication trends.

The study analyses five volumes of LR from the year 2007 to 2011 and employs the required bibliometric measures to analyze specific aspects of publishing trends of LR for the stated period.

The study finds that single authored articles occupy the prominent position indicating the supremacy of solo research in LR. The degree of collaboration in the publications of this journal is found to be 0.36. It is evident that LR has accommodated over 22 citations per article during the publication phase from 2007 to 2011. In regard to country productivity, the UK leads the table, followed by the USA and Nigeria. However, Poland occupies the bottom position in the ranking. Hence, it is evident that the major chunks of contributions reflected in the publications of LR during the stated period are emanated from the UK and the USA.

The study focuses on the publication patterns of LR over a period of five years. Patterns of research output in 275 publications are analyzed. Further studies can include a comparative study of LR with that of a contemporary journal in the field of library and information science (LIS).

Teachers and research scholars of LIS can benefit from insights into the scholarly contributions of LR that has accommodated 312 authors representing 49 countries.

The study yields some interesting findings of academic publishing in LR. It can help the readers of LR to understand the most striking contributions, highly cited journals, the most prolific authors, country productivity, and assorted parameters.

The purpose of this paper was to check the validity of Bradford’s Law in the contemporary world of academic electronic mailing lists.

The present research study applied Bradford’s Law to academic electronic mailing lists to determine: whether, on the Internet, mailing lists and the posts sent to them follow the same distribution as scientific journals and the articles published in them with respect to the original form of Bradford’s Law; and whether the behaviour of the Bradford distributions differs depending on the type of academic discipline (social studies or sciences) and subject category (documentation and education, medicine and life sciences) to which the list belongs. As a prior step, the utility of mailing lists was analysed during the 10-year period of 2002-2011, together with their expected future in terms of ratifying the applicability of the Law.

The results showed that, in general, electronic mailing lists are continuing to be used, and that Bradford’s Law is indeed satisfied, especially in the science subject categories, coherent with the fact that Bradford’s Law in cybermetrics holds only for fairly narrow (closed) and well-defined (homogeneous) environments.

The originality of the present research study was to check the validity of the historic Bradford’s Law in the contemporary world of Internet.

An exact, discrete formulation of Bradford's law describing the distribution of articles in journals is derived by showing that Bradford's law is a special case of the Zipf‐Mandelbrot ‘rank frequency’ law. A relatively simple method is presented for fitting the model to empirical data and estimating the number of journals and articles in a subject collection. This method is demonstrated with an example application.

The present paper aims at analyzing the research output performance of library and information science (LIS) professionals. Citation analysis of all the journal articles published in the Collection Building journal during 2009-2012 is carried out.

The data for this study were drawn from a selective sample of a free e-journal, i.e. Collection Building, available through the Kuvempu University Web site without subscription or registration. A total of 91 articles published during 2009 to 2012 with 1,302 citations. The analysis cover mainly the number of articles, authorship pattern, subject-wise distribution of articles, average number of references per articles, forms of documents cited, rank list of journals, Bradford’s law.

The study reveals that journals (53.84 per cent of citations) are the most preferred sources of information used by the researchers in the field of LIS. It is followed by Web resources with 24.27 per cent, these two together constitute 78.11 per cent of total citations and remaining 21.89 per cent of citations from books, proceedings, theses, reports and gazetteer. Collection Building (USA) has ranked first with 68 (9.70 per cent) citations. Further, Bradford’s law of scattering was applied. It is observed that major citations are from journal literature. In addition, more cited materials were contributed by multi-authors, and degree of collaboration is 0.44.

The paper presents a sense of the importance of LIS research, and as such, informs the community and researchers involved in the citation analysis.

The outcome of the study is an original research work with citation analysis of LIS publications. The study highlights the information materials available and used by researchers in the field of LIS, and those that need to be added for a healthy collection.

This study aims to make recommendations for library collection development because undergraduates expect to satisfy their information need for research activities through library collection. Therefore librarian should assess whether the library is adequately responding their research demands. This can be answered by analyzing citations in the dissertations.

The study analyzed 8,224 citations from 204 undergraduate dissertations submitted to the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, in 2012. The most cited format was determined. Bradford’s law was applied to prepare a ranked list of journals. Accessibility of each core journals was observed and recommendations were made for collection development.

Journals were the most cited format. Data sets were fit with either the verbal formula or mathematical formula of the Bradford’s law. Core journals were determined. Core journals were accessible via number of ways. Some journals are subscribed by the Agriculture or via databases through UGC consortia (through University of Peradeniya’s library network) or open access journals. There are several journals in which the free access is available through Sri Lanka Journals OnLine. Based on the results, recommendations were made for collection development.

The paper provides useful insight for collection development for research demand, Agriculture Library, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

Bradford's Law is presented as an observation made from the outcome of searching, rather than a mathematical development. The organization and presentation of search data is explained. Potential applications of Bradford's Law are discussed. New findings are presented which show the relationship described by Bradford's Law to be fundamentally important but in a more subtle way than previously supposed. Future developments are suggested in terms of their impact on librarianship.

A probabilistic mechanism is proposed to describe various forms of the Bradford phenomenon reported in bibliometric research. This leads to a stochastic process termed the Waring process, a special case of which seems to conform with the general features of ‘Bradford's Law’. The presence of a time parameter in the model emphasises that we are considering dynamic systems and allows the possibility of predictions being made.

Any statistical regularities found in documentation should be fully exploited to produce estimates or predictions and to save documentalists work. But present formulations of the Bradford distribution demand penetrating search for peripheral papers and tedious computation in application. The present paper shows that the Bradford distribution is closely related to the Zipf distribution. It requires data on only the most productive journals, is mathematically simple and amenable to graphical methods if a proposed idea of the ‘completeness’ of a search is accepted. For comparability of results, certain conditions, which include a specified minimum level of productivity of journals, need to be standardized. A standard form is suggested. It is found, however, that a modified form of the Bradford distribution is required when Bradford‐type collections of journals are merged into larger collections, when ‘saturation’ of the most productive journals occurs.

Bradford distributions describe the relationship between ‘journal productivities’ and ‘journal rankings by productivity’. However, different ranking conventions exist, implying some ambiguity as to what the Bradford distribution ‘is’. A need accordingly arises for a standard ranking convention to assist comparisons between empirical data, and also comparisons between empirical data and theoretical models. Five ranking conventions are described including the one used originally by Bradford, along with suggested distinctions between ‘Bradford data set’, ‘Bradford distribution’, ‘Bradford graph’, ‘Bradford log graph’, ‘Bradford model’ and ‘Bradford’s Law‘. Constructions such as the Lotka distribution, Groos droop (generalised to accommodate growth as well as fall‐off in the Bradford log graph), Brookes hooks, and the slope and intercept of the Bradford log graph are clarified on this basis. Concepts or procedures questioned include: (1) ‘core journal’, from the Bradfordian viewpoint; (2) the use of traditional statistical inferential procedures applied to Bradford data; and (3) R(n) as a maximum (rather than median or mean) value at tied‐rank values.