Abstract
Investigation into citation and authorship patterns in language and linguistics research is of serious interest to librarians and researchers. The purpose of this paper is to examine scholarly communication behaviour in languages using theses and dissertations to enhance collection development policy in linguistics research. Bibliometric and informetrics indicators were used to examine a total of 87 theses and dissertations submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages from 2005 to 2014. A retrospective descriptive study was conducted using bibliometric indicators such as types of cited sources, timeliness of cited sources, authorship pattern, rank list of frequently cited books and degree of research collaboration. A total of 5084 bibliographic references were extracted from the theses with an average of 58.4 citations per theses. Books and monographs dominated the entire citations with 63.6% while journal citations were 17.9%. Electronic resources accounted for 15.4% of the citations. This study provides useful evidence to librarians who would be interested in developing the language library collections. Monographs have been found to be more useful for language researchers and collection development librarians will be guided in policy formulation particularly academic libraries where language research needs to be supported. There has been paucity of citation studies in the humanities generally and linguistics in particular. This study is an original research adopting bibliometric approach to examine scholarly communication in language and linguistics using University of Nigeria, Nsukka as a case study. Keywords: Bibliometrics, Citation Analysis, Authorship Pattern, Information Science, Language Research, Scholarly Communication
Highlights
Language plays very critical roles in the overall national development and global integration
The purpose of this paper is to examine the citations and authorship patterns in language research using theses and dissertations submitted to Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Language, University of Nigeria Nsukka
The findings reveal that books and monographs are mainly used by language researchers
Summary
Language plays very critical roles in the overall national development and global integration. This is why linguists are interested in the development of languages through research and enunciation of language policies in many cultures all over the world. There are at least two areas in which language is crucial to national development: literacy and communication (Bamgbose, 2003) for there is an obvious link between literacy and development. A rank list of the most frequently cited books is presented in table 8. Noam Chomsky’s book Aspect of the theory of syntax published in 1965 ranked first followed by Yoruba oral tradition by W Abimbola. A close observation of the Table indicates that most of the books in the ranked list were published between 1960 and 1980.
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