University of Arkansas Food Science Faculty Publications and the Characteristics of Their Cited References: A Bibliometric Study

ABSTRACT

In the allocation of collection resources, it is important to have a good understanding of the teaching, instruction and research needs of faculty and graduate students. Data related to the use of electronic databases, journals, books, etc. is helpful; however, this data does not reflect the nature and impact of the information retrieved, but merely provides a general idea of the number of times items have been searched, retrieved or borrowed. By identifying and analyzing faculty and graduate students' publications and grant proposals to determine where researchers are publishing and what sources they are citing in their research, the Library can assess how well it is supplying a core of literature to meet research needs. To this end, this study analyzes the publication and citation patterns of food science faculty at the University of Arkansas for a fourteen-year period, 1990–2003. The findings show that faculty are using and citing materials ranging from 1 to 22 years old and that 85 titles account for only 13.67% of the total journals cited but for 77.75% of the citations. It is assumed that these 85 titles constitute the core journal titles for food science research.