Citation Patterns of the Research Literature of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Abstract

During the last three to four decades, a whole new area of study, called science, has developed side-by-side with the conventional area of librarianship.' As is typical of most young fields of study, especially interdisciplinary ones, various definitions concerning the scope and objectives of information science exist.2 Most of these definitions agree that information science deals with various aspects concerning the creation, flow, dissemination, and use of human knowledge, in oral or written form. One of the main areas in the field of information science is bibliometrics, which has recently been defined as a statistical or quantitative description of (scientific or scholarly) literature. Bibliometrics furnishes possible methods by which significant features of a literature may be described and its working monitored.3 Scholars in the area of bibliometrics employ various techniques to describe quantitatively the communication patterns of a particular research field. Among these techniques are: analysis of growth and obsolescence patterns, content analysis, frequency distributions, mapping, sociometrics, and citation analysis. Citation analysis, which served as research technique for this study, has been defined as the analysis of the references in scholarly publications of a particular subject field in order to describe patterns of citation. Characteristics of cited materials frequently examined include form, age, frequently-cited authors and journals, languages and countries of origin, and subject distributions. The investigator may also look for changes in these characteristics over a period of time. Despite certain obvious shortcomings,4 citation analysis has become