Citation Analysis of ThesesDissertations A basic analysis of

Citation Analysis of Theses/Dissertations A basic analysis of sources, dates, authors for a Marine Biological Laboratory SAIL meeting - Wilmington, N. C. - May 14, 2009 Kathleen Heil, UMCES, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, Solomons, MD

Introduction: In these tough financial times when science is becoming more interdisciplinary and subfields are expanding as are number of titles in the sciences I wanted a way to evaluate material usage. Since most of our journals are now accessible on-line I had lost my major source of input on usage, which was re-shelving and observation.

Citation analysis has merits and limitations, but has many applications beyond collection development. Although I haven’t gotten further than the collection development access at this point. My future goal is to show institutional relatedness. (How broad or limited are our institutional connections)

Background: CBL has always had very strong ties to the University Maryland 1925 Founded under Dr. Truitt from Univ. of Md. 1930’s Start of summer programs of 1941 Sponsored by the Md. Conservation Dept and became the chief component of the State Dept. of Research and Education 1961 Md. Legislature created the Natural Resources Institute as part of the University of Maryland ◦ Summer Classes began as Credit courses toward degrees 1973 Became part of a new Campus of the University of Maryland System - The Center for Environmental & Estuarine Studies (UMCEES) 1997 Became UMCES (University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Background/History (continued) 1976 Graduate students formally began work during the school year as part of their graduate school experience The first degrees were issued in : ◦ 1976 MS under the Dept of Botany University of Maryland College Park ◦ 1981 Ph. D Under the Dept of Microbiology University of Maryland College Park

Objective: Compare and contrast literature citations from MS & Ph. D theses/dissertations ◦ Identify citation patterns ◦ Formats of materials used ◦ Most frequently cited material ◦ Differences between subject areas

Methodology: Use DRUM, the University of Maryland Dspace Open Access archive to pull UMCES-CBL theses/dissertations from the last 5 years. http: //www. lib. umd. edu/drum Copy and paste references into Word and then move them into Excel. Put each thesis/dissertation into a new tab Sort data into uniformat: author, year, title, source.

Find usage by year Sort by year Graph Hope to get to soon - ◦ Use find replace function to switch years to age

Identify Materials Cited A/V B C D/TH Go Gr J M N P S T W Audio tape / Video Monograph Conference Paper Dissertation / Thesis Government document/web site Grey Literature Journal Magazine Newspaper Personal Communication Software Technical report Web site/ web page

Journal usage trends: Title dispersion Proportion of journals cited Most cited Journals

Most Heavily Cited Journals I reviewed a merged listing of publications After doing sort on material type There were 40 journal titles that had over 10 citations Range from 10 to 119 The highest used title was Environmental Science and technology

Top 5 cited journals

MS These Sources by type

MS Theses Top 20 Journals

Journals with over 5 Cites Ann Rev Microb 5 Appl Envir. Micro 85 Aquat Microb Ecol 18 Aquat Tox 5 Arch Env. Cont. &Tox 4 Ecotox & Envir. Safety 5 Environ. Microbiol 10 ES&T 24 Environ. Tox & Chem 20 FEMS Microbiology Ecol 8 Geochi et Cosmo Acta 7 J. Bact. 8 L&O 18 Marine Biology 5 MEPS 9 Microbial Ecol 8 Nature 10 Organic Geochem 8 Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 9 Science Water Air & Soil Poll 13 5 284

References: Ashman, Allen B. “An examination of the research objectives of recent citation analysis studies” Collection Management 34 : 112 -128, 2009. Bakkalbasi, Nisa, Kathleen Bauer, Janis Glover and Lei Wang “Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science” eprints. rclis. org/archive/00006080 Burrell, Quentin L. “Are “Sleeping Beauties” to be expected? (Short communication) Scientometrics v. 65 (3): 381 -389, 2005. Cordes, Ruth, “Is grey literature ever used? Using citation analysis to measure the impact of GESAMP, an international marine scientific advisory body” Can. J. Infor & Lib. Sci v. 28 (1): 49 -69, 2004 Cox, Janice E. “Citation analysis of graduate dental theses references: implications for collection development”. Collection management 33 (3): 219 -234, 2008. Kuruppu, Pali U. & Debra C. Moore “Information use by Ph. D students I agriculture and biology: a dissertation citation analysis” Portal: Libraries and the academy v. 8 (4): 2008, pp. 387 -405. Moed, Henk F. “new developments in citation analysis and research evaluation” Information Services & Use (2006) 135 -137 Ortega, Linda “Age of reference in chemistry articles: Science & Technology Libraries, 28 (3): 209 -46, 2008. Radicchi, Filippo, Santo Fortunate & Claudio Castellano “Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objetive measure of scientific impact” PNAS Nov. 11, 2008. Vol. 105 (45) 17268 -17278. Ralston, Rick, Carole Gall, Frances A. Brahmi “Do local citation patterns support use of the impact factor for collection development” J. Med. Libr. Assoc. 96 (4): Oct. 2008 pp. 374 -378. Su, Yu-Min, Shu-Ching Yang, Ping-Yu Hsu, Wen-Lung Shiau “Extending co-citation analysis to discover authors with multiple expertise” Expert Systems with Applications 36: 4287 -4295, 2009 Tunon, Johanna, Bruce Brydges. “Expanded assessment study examining the citation patterns from traditional and nontraditional institutions and their effect upon the quality of doctoral dissertation reference lists. Vallmitjana, Nuria and L. G. Sabate. “Citation analysis of Ph. D Dissertation references as a tool for collection management in an academic chemistry library. College & Research libraries v. 69 (1) : 72 -81, Jan 2008.