Being Part of the Conversation: The Most Cited Articles in Library History and Library & Information History, 1967–2015

ABSTRACT

A half-century of cited references to Library History and Library & Information History is analysed. A list of the books and journals that most often cite articles in Library History and Library & Information History reveals the wide scope of scholarship over the past half-century that has been influenced by the authors whose work appear within these pages.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliometrics
• historiography
• citation analysis
• Library History
• Library & Information History

Notes

1. Peter A. Hoare, “The Library History Group of the Library Association,” Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science v. 39, Supplement 4 (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1985), 261–64.

2. “Library History Group 1962–1968: The Early Minutes,” Library History 12, no. 1 (1996): 263–71. The Library History Group's first seven newsletters for 1962–1966 have been digitized and are available at http://www.cilip.org.uk/library-information-history-group/publications/newsletter/newsletters-1962-1966 (accessed March 14, 2016).

3. For an historiographical assessment of information history during this century's first few years, see Toni Weller, “An Information History Decade: A Review of the Literature and Concepts, 2000–2009,” Library & Information History 26, no. 1 (2010): 83–97. Also useful are two recent surveys by Weller: Information History—An Introduction: Exploring an Emergent Field (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2008) and Information History in the Modern World: Histories of the Information Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

4. The journal's editors share their editorial lives in Peter Hoare, P. S. Morrish, K. A. Manley, and Alistair Black, “Forty Years of Library History: The Editors’ Testimony,” Library History 23, no. 1 (2007): 3–15.

5. Margaret F. Stieg, The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 20–81.

6. For a similar analysis of the American library history journal, see Edward A. Goedeken, “History With an Impact: The Most Cited Articles in the Journal of Library History and Its Successors Over the Past Fifty Years,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 50, no. 3 (2015): 285–314. For a broader recent assessment of citation behavior in our field, see William H. Walters and Esther Isabelle Wilder, “Disciplinary, National, and Departmental Contributions to the Literature of Library and Information Science, 2007–2012,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67, no. 6 (2016): 1487–506.

7. Two of Garfield's significant articles include “Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation Through Association of Ideas,” Science 122 (July 15, 1955): 108–11, and “Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation,” Science 178 (November 3, 1972): 471–79. The Gross and Gross article is P. L. K. Gross and E. M. Gross, “College Libraries and Chemical Education,” Science 61 (October 28, 1927): 385–89.

8. Blaise Cronin and Cassidy R. Sugimoto, eds., Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Blaise Cronin and Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Scholarly Metrics Under the Microscope: From Citation Analysis to Academic Auditing (Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2015); and Nicola De Bellis, Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis: From the Science Citation Index to Cybermetrics (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009).

9. Helen Stegall Phelps, “The Second Vatican Council and American Catholic Theological Research: A Bibliometric Analysis of Theological Studies, 1940–1995,” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Texas, 2000), 147.

10. Frank A. Badua, Gary John Previts, and Miklos A. Vasarhelyi, “Tracing the Development of Accounting Thought by Analyzing Content, Communication, and Quality in Accounting Research Over Time,” Accounting Historians Journal 38, no. 1 (2011): 31–56; E. Han Kim, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales, “What Has Mattered to Economics Since 1970,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006): 189–202; Éric Montpetit, André Blais, and Martial Foucault, “What Does It Take for a Canadian Political Scientist to be Cited?,” Social Science Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2008): 802–16; and Jari Ojala and Stig Tenold, “What Is Maritime History?: A Content and Contributor Analysis of the International Journal of Maritime History, 1989–2012,” 25, no. 2 (2013): 17–34.

11. Stepanie Haustein and Vincent Larivière, “A Multidimensional Analysis of Aslib Proceedings—Using Everything but the Impact Factor,” Aslib Journal of Information Management 66, no. 4 (2014): 358–80.

12. Victoria Anauati, Sebastian Galiani, and Ramiro H. Gálvez, “Quantifying the Life Cycle of Scholarly Articles Across Fields of Economic Research,” Economic Inquiry 54, no. 2 (2016): 1339–55, and Gianfranco Di Vaio, Daniel Waldenström, and Jacob Weisdorf, “Citation Success: Evidence From Economic History Journal Publications,” Explorations in Economic History 49 (2012): 92–104.

13. For recent examples of using these citation assessment tools, see Leslie S. Adriaanse and Chris Rensleigh, “Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar: A Content Comprehensiveness Comparison,” Electronic Library 31, no. 6 (2013): 727–44; Elaine M. Lasda Bergman, “Finding Citations to Social Work Literature: The Relative Benefits of Using Web of Science, Scopus, or Google Scholar,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 38, no. 6 (2012): 370–79; Péter Jacsò, “Pragmatic Issues in Calculating and Comparing the Quantity and Quality of Research Through Rating and Ranking of Researchers Based on Peer Reviews and Bibliometric Indicators From Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar,” Online Information Review 34, no. 6 (2010): 972–82; and Joost C. F. de Winter, Amir A. Zadpoor, and Dimitra Dodou, “The Expansion of Google Scholar Versus Web of Science: A Longitudinal Study,” Scientometrics 98, no. 2 (2014): 1547–65.

14. For examples of current research on using Google Scholar for book citations, see Kayvan Kousha, Mike Thelwall, and Somayeh Resaie, “Assessing the Citation Impact of Books: The Role of Google Books, Google Scholar, and Scopus,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 11 (2011): 2147–64; Kayvan Kousha and Mike Thelwall, “Google Book Search: Citation Analysis for Social Science and the Humanities,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 60, no. 8 (2009): 1537–49; and Anne-Wil Harzing, “A Longitudinal Study of Google Scholar Coverage Between 2012 and 2013,” Scientometrics 98, no. 1 (2014): 565–75.

15. An overview of the development of the new iSchools can be found in Robert Wedgeworth, “Certain Characteristics of iSchools Compared to Other LIS Programs,” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2013), 88.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward A. Goedeken

Edward A. Goedeken is Collections Coordinator and Professor of Library and Information Science at the Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa.