Scattering of journals cited in legal theses and dissertations

Abstract

The study employed bibliometrics methods to analyse the scattering of 596 journals cited in legal master’s theses and doctoral dissertations in three South African law schools from 2014 to 2018. In addition, the study included an analysis of the extent of citation of different sources and examined the effect of use of non-legal journals by law students. It was found that students used 449.2 documents on average in writing a doctoral dissertation and 110.9 references per master’s thesis. Journals received more citations than any other document formats although 16 master’s theses were completed without citing a single journal. Generally, the journals cited in legal theses and dissertations conform to Bradford’s Law but they differ in their level of conformity by law school. There was a high degree of overlaps between Zone 1 journals in the three law schools. All journals in the core lists were available in all the law schools which was attributed to the strength of collections in these schools. The results support the application of bibliometric analyses to legal master’s theses and doctoral dissertations to make collection development decisions. In making those decisions, however, law librarians would have to look beyond the Zone 1 journals of their own institution for wider access. These results also serve as a caution to law librarians to look beyond the traditional law journals in de/selecting journals, as some of the non-legal journals in this study made it to the core list of cited periodicals. Furthermore, this study points to the strength of library collections in the top law school libraries in the country.