Abstract
This study characterizes the literature of the radiation therapy profession, identifies the journals most frequently cited by authors writing in this discipline, and determines the level of coverage of these journals by major bibliographic indexes. Cited references from three discipline-specific source journals were analyzed according to the Mapping the Literature of Allied Health Project Protocol of the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section of the Medical Library Association. Bradford's Law of Scattering was applied to all journal references to identify the most frequently cited journal titles. Journal references constituted 77.8% of the total, with books, government documents, Internet sites, and miscellaneous sources making up the remainder. Although a total of 908 journal titles were cited overall, approximately one-third of the journal citations came from just 11 journals. MEDLINE and Scopus provided the most comprehensive indexing of the journal titles in Zones 1 and 2. The source journals were indexed only by CINAHL and Scopus. The knowledgebase of radiation therapy draws heavily from the fields of oncology, radiology, medical physics, and nursing. Discipline-specific publications are not currently well covered by major indexing services, and those wishing to conduct comprehensive literature searches should search multiple resources.
Highlights
This study sought to characterize the literature of radiation therapy, a specialty area of radiologic technology, through use of citation analysis
It is an installment in the Mapping the Literature of Allied Health Project of the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section (NAHRS) of the Medical Library Association
When data from each source journal were examined separately, it appears that articles published in Radiation Therapist used somewhat fewer references to journal articles and somewhat more references to books and Internet resources than the other 2 source journals
Summary
This study sought to characterize the literature of radiation therapy (radiotherapy), a specialty area of radiologic technology, through use of citation analysis. It is an installment in the Mapping the Literature of Allied Health Project of the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section (NAHRS) of the Medical Library Association. Along with surgery and chemotherapy, is one of modern medicine’s most powerful weapons in the fight against cancer. Radiation therapy is usually administered externally through the use of high energy X-ray beams or internally by placing radioactive substances in or next to a tumor, a method referred to as brachytherapy
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