Scientometric Analysis of Contributions to the Journal College and Research Libraries (1997-2011)

Abstract

In this study an attempt is made to investigate the scholarly communications in College & Research Libraries journal during the period of 1997-2011 and to study the key dimensions of its publication trends. For the analysis of the study 15 volumes containing 90 issues have been taken up for evaluation. Necessary bibliometric measures are applied to analyse different publication parameters. It is found that, contributions of articles to each volume of College & Research Libraries is nearly consistent and on an average 32 articles have been published every year. Single authored articles are found to be the highest followed by two and three authored articles. The average degree of collaboration in College & Research Libraries is 0.57. The average author per article is 1.88 for 479 articles. Lotka’s law is tested and confers to a value of n=3.22. In all 12893 citations have been appended to 479 articles during the period 1997-2011. Journals (59.95 per cent) are the top form of source used by authors followed by books (17.32 per cent), webpages (7.44 per cent) and reports (3.95 per cent). Ranked list of prolific authors and ranked list of journals is prepared and presented in respective tables. Deborah D Blecic and Stephen E Wiberley have topped the ranked list of prolific authors with 6 articles each. College & Research Libraries which is also the source journal of this study has topped the ranked list of journals with 1311 (16.96 per cent) citations. USA has topped the list of ranking of country productivity with 93.24 per cent contributions followed by Canada and China.