Presents a number of brief reports on the latest trends and current circumstances surrounding African American progress in higher education. Discussions include an analysis of financial barriers, Harvard's push for diversification, academic citation systems and black scholarship, and the 1993 court ruling on Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Afrocentrism.…

Reports on findings from a citation analysis of publications of university molecular-biology faculty that examined materials cited in published articles to determine the nature of information used in their research. Ranked lists of cited journals provide implications for library services, collection development, and the potential for electronic…

Analysis of 9,442 headings assigned by the Library of Congress to bibliographic records disclosed errors and obsolete elements involving MARC coding, terminology in main headings and subdivisions, application of subdivisions, and in mechanical elements. Awareness and understanding of patterns of errors and obsolescence in subject headings should…

Purpose of this study was to examine whether data collected locally by biology faculty at a large research university may provide a better indicator of journals they value than data compiled over a broad geographic area, to relate those journal issues cited by faculty to the holdings of the library, and to determine how faculty access articles…

The articles published in four prominent distance education journals between 1997 and 2002 were categorized and the references cited were tallied. The study provides an opportunity to examine research topics, methods, and citation trends. The results can be used to review current research trends and to explore potential research directions.…

In the Western academic tradition the literature review is seen as an essential first step toward legitimate research. Literature reviews, however, are also standard in many other scholarly publishing and proposal formats, whether as material included within the text or as provided in footnotes. The literature review serves to establish the…

When publications are used in the evaluation of research performance, tensions between the simplifying, standardizing approaches of evaluations and the communication practices of scientific communities are likely to arise. An analysis of data gathered in an evaluation at the Australian National University demonstrates that many academic…

In an era of spiraling costs, librarians must carefully assess literature use among their patron groups when making decisions on selection, deselection, and storage of journals. A citation analysis was conducted using a group of 52 papers submitted by research physicians at the Summa Health System (Akron, Ohio) for a research award competition…

Describes a study which demonstrates that unintended logical connections within scientific literature, which potentially reveal new knowledge, are unmarked by reference citations or other bibliographic clues. Citation analysis of two separate literatures in biomedicine that have a logical link is used to support this hypothesis. (Author/CLB)

Examines how three English-speaking advisers and their non-native English-speaking doctoral students used citations and related writing techniques to make new knowledge claims in science dissertation writing. Finds that academic advisers play an important role in helping the students, and finds no negative influence from the students' native…

Investigates the potential value of bibliometric analysis of freshman English research paper bibliographies to assess student behavior in terms of skills and resources addressed in library instruction sessions. Suggests that students' bibliographies provide a flexible, time-efficient assessment method for the documentation of student library use.…

Describes results of a citation analysis of library and information science journals that was conducted to identify factors associated with subjective rankings of a journal's value in promotion and tenure decisions. Discussion covers citation measures used; hypotheses tested; and correlations between prestige rankings--from a survey of research…

The effectiveness of using the age of references to control the exhaustivity of the reference representation in information retrieval was investigated through analysis of optimal cluster-based retrieval results. The results show that the foreground representation at its optimal level of exhaustivity is restricted to references with ages less than…

A project designed to facilitate scholarly networking among business administration faculty, thereby contributing to the reputation of colleagues and colleges, used citation analysis to identify invisible college researcher networks and disseminate information about them. Ideas for encouraging networking, including editorial support, journal…

Explores the composition of the literature of international librarianship through a bibliometric analysis. Areas studied include what disciplines have contributed to international librarianship, how contributions of publications have fluctuated, what countries have contributed, and who the key authors are. Recommendations for further study are…