Journal Bibliometric Analysis: A Case Study on the JASIST

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), and other disciplines by citation analysis. The citation data were drawn from references of each article of JASIST in 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2004. The Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, Library of Congress Subject Heading, retrieved from the WorldCat and LISA database were used to identify the main class, subclass and subject of cited journals and books. The results of this study revealed that the production rate of JASIST literature doubles and the average number of references cited per paper is also increased 2 to 3 times in a period of about 25 years. Beginning in 1995, there has been a significant increase in the number of electronic resources and constitutes 5% of all document types in 2004. JASIST itself is the most highly cited, and is followed by four library and information science (LIS) journals, namely Information Processing and Management, Journal of Documentation, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology and Journal of Information Science. The number of countries publishing the cited journal increases from 9 to 26 within 25 years. The three main classes of journals that were cited by JASIST most are library science (50%), science (22.7%) and social sciences (6.3%). The three subclasses of LIS encompass general bibliography, machine methods of information & retrieval and mechanized bibliographic control and library & information science. The top five most cited books of JASIST are Smart Retrieval System—Experiments in Automatic Document Processing, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, Information Retrieval, Little Science and Big Science, Information Seeking in Electronic Environments, Information Retrieval: Data Structure and Algorithms. The most cited books of JASIST are quite dispersive and science is the most cited class followed by LIS, social sciences, philosophy/psychology/religion, and the most cited subject is computerized information retrieval and mechanized bibliographic control.