Citation Analysis: Your Tool for Collection Development & Enhanced Liaison Services

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Brown, Christine
  • Lacroix, Denis

• Objective:This session will explain how citation analysis can contribute to academic librarians’ understanding of the complex landscape of university researchers’ publishing choices. The need to understand publication output of humanities/social science researchers is even more pressing given the current financial climate. Librarians are best positioned to analyze, describe and contextualize what researchers are publishing and citing to inform work in collection development and university administration. Methods: Presenters will outline a study undertaken to examine ten years of faculty publication behaviour in three academic disciplines (Romance Languages, Political Science, and Linguistics) conducted to describe the institutional publication landscape, the difference in landscape in past studies, the types of sources used by researchers, the role of language and age in publishing and citing, and the change in research output and information needs during a decade. Results: This study is not only interesting for the findings it brings, but also for the thorough methodological approach it used in gathering, managing, and analyzing data. Evaluative tools used to describe the data and its repurposing for deposit in an institutional repository will also be addressed. Conclusion: The impact of a solid understanding of researcher publications and their sources of information help academic librarians promote research and adapt library collection development in these disciplines.

• Date created

  2012-05-30

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Citation Analysis
  • Liaison Librarians
  • Collection development
  • 1999-2009
  • University of Alberta, Faculty of Arts

• Type of Item

  Conference/Workshop Poster

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3N00ZV30

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International