Doctoral Theses in Environmental Science

Abstract

The result of this study is an original research work with application of Bradford's law and an obsolescence study of environmental science literature. The article represents the availability of information and information used by the researchers in the field of environmental science for their research work. The research design adopted was a descriptive study. Data was collected from 66 doctoral theses submitted to the Kuvempu University in the field of Environmental Science during 1998-2012 have been taken as the source of data for the present study; these doctoral theses generated 14,668 total citations. The study is based on the analysis of bibliographic references appended at the end of each chapter and footnotes, if any. Each thesis was manually examined and references appended at the end of each chapter were extracted. All the references were noted. Later, the data were fed into the computer using MS-Excel and separate sheets and columns were created to enter data. Finally, the data was transferred to SPSS software to generate the tables, graphs and results. The present article reveals that journals have the highest number of citations accounting to 72.25% of the total citations. The Journal of Hydrobiologia from the Netherlands occupies the first rank as the most preferred journal having been cited 546 (5.15%) times. Further, Bradford's law was applied and studied the obsolescence of journal literature. Finally half-life of journal citations was found 14 years old in the field of Environmental Science.