03 July 2012

Project for a Master's dissertation?


Here's a possible project for a Master's dissertation.

All papers in the journal now have a new link to Google Scholar to determine how many citations it has had. I had previously used a method that worked, but Google seems to have changed things so that they no longer work, so I've changed all of the papers to the new method.  I'd be interested to know how often this link is used by people, since it can be a very useful way of finding out about more recent literature on the same subject.   I have analysed the citations to papers for Volume 12 No. 1, which happened to have some of the ISIC conference papers in it. The fifteen papers had a total of 170 citations, ranging from 0 for a couple of papers to 40 for another. Self-citation accounted for 14% of the total. The most frequently occuring journal was Information Research with 22 citations, followed by ARIST with 6, and JASIST and Journal of Documentation with 5 each. In total, 54 journals were cited, along with  15 conference papers (6 of which were in Proceedings of ASIST). Nine citations were found in books (usually compilations of chapters, rather than monographs) and there were 8 citations from articles in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Thirteen citations were found in PhD theses, and there was a sprinking in unpublished papers and PowerPoint presentations. Publications were in nine languages: Chinese, English , Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. A sign of the times, perhaps, was that the most-frequent, non-English language, was Chinese, with a total of six papers.

I don't have the time to do this for all issues of the journal, but I think it would make a nice student project to take a reasonable number of issues and expand my pilot study.  Any takers?

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