Research Strategies

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Research StrategiesSteven L. Johns MLIS a b & Diana D. Shonrock MLS a cd

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Research Strategies:A Bibliometric Study/Analysisof the First Sixteen Volumes

Steven L. JohnsDiana D. Shonrock

ABSTRACT. This analysis of the first 16 volumes of Research Strate-gies examines authorship patterns, including gender, collaboration, andprofessional and institutional affiliation. All references in the first 16volumes are analyzed by type and age. Journals most often referenced inResearch Strategies, and journals most often citing articles in ResearchStrategies are included in the analysis. Two of the questions the authorssought to answer were whether the percentage of research articles pub-lished in Research Strategies had increased over time, and whether thenumber of Research Strategies articles cited by other journals had in-creased. doi:10.1300/J123v53n01_17 [Article copies available for a fee fromThe Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>© 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Research Strategies, bibliographic instruction, libraryinstruction, bibliometric analysis, citation analysis

Steven L. Johns is Social Sciences & Humanities Librarian, Iowa State UniversityLibrary, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-2140. He earned his MLIS from theUniversity of Texas in 1994 (E-mail: [email protected]).

Diana D. Shonrock is Science & Technology Librarian, Iowa State University Li-brary, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-2140. She is also President of the Refer-ence and User Services Association, a division of the American Library Association.She earned her MLS from the University of Iowa (E-mail: [email protected]).

The Serials Librarian, Vol. 53(1/2) 2007Available online at http://ser.haworthpress.com

© 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1300/J123v53n01_17 211

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mailto:[email protected]

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When Research Strategies began publication in 1983, it was the re-sult of trends begun in the 1960s. Although the history of library in-struction can be traced back to time earlier to 1900, academic libraryinstruction mushroomed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, result-ing in the founding in 1973 of the Library Orientation Exchange(LOEX), a non-profit educational clearinghouse.1 Beginning in 1978,two new organizational units began their work within American LibraryAssociation: the Bibliographic Instruction Section (BIS–now IS, the In-struction Section) of the Association of College and Research Librariesand the Library Instructions Round Table (LIRT). LIRT advocates li-brary instruction as a means for developing competent library and infor-mation use as a part of lifelong learning. LIRT membership representsall types of libraries (academic, public, school, and special) committedto this goal. As their membership grew, the members of LIRT and BISfound they didn’t really have a journal to serve as an outlet for publica-tion by their members. The increase in the amount of significant writingaccompanying the renewed interest in library instruction issues2 re-sulted in a new journal being conceived, dedicated to providing a forumfor articles on those issues. In 1983, the first issue of Research Strate-gies was published. It included an editorial titled “Start-up Thoughts,”four articles, features and columns, and reviews, and ended with a one-time feature titled “Topics in Search of Authors.” Up through the writ-ing of this paper, Research Strategies was the only journal strictlydevoted to library instruction. With its demise, the library communityhas lost an important forum for publishing research in library instruc-tion and information literacy.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this study was to examine the information obtainedfrom doing a historical/longitudinal bibliometric analysis of the re-search articles in the journal Research Strategies. The analysis itselfwas to determine who was writing for the journal, what types of articleswere being published in the journal, what types of references were usedby the authors in creating those articles, and what other journals wereciting articles published in Research Strategies. Learning how practi-tioners and researchers in the field of library instruction and informationliteracy have used this journal might yield insight into what its demisemight mean for the future direction of research in those same fields. Ac-cording to Najman, “Journals are the primary medium through which an

212 THE SERIALS LIBRARIAN

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academic community certifies additions to its body of accepted knowl-edge.”3 This article will evaluate the importance of Research Strategiesto the field of library instruction and determine how authors writing inthe field used and cited the journal. Bibliometric analysis is one methodthat can be used to compare and evaluate observations and perceptionsabout a journal’s contents and about what sources are cited by most re-searchers.

Bibliometric studies by Siddiqui,4 in 1997, and Hofacre5 in 2004both look at authorship attributes of articles published in library and in-formation science (LIS) journals. Siddiqui’s study looked at all articlespublished in 1993 in the Journal of the American Society for Informa-tion Science, Information Technology and Libraries, Journal of Infor-mation Science, and Program. Hofacre analyzed articles published overa 10-year period in the American Archivist. A comparison of the resultsof both studies to our own is found in the results and discussion section.

According to Ginn,6 “Citation analysis is a form of bibliometricstudy that inspects elements of data contained within the citations at theend of authored articles in journals and scholarly writings, bibliogra-phies, footnotes and indexing tools.” This type of study of citation pat-terns is conducted to reveal or indicate possible areas of strength; forexample, how many times the same authors are cited by other authorsover a period of time within the literature of a discipline or within a seg-ment of the literature. Citation analysis can also be used to determinewhat other journals and authors are citing a particular journal.

Meyer and Spencer7 in their 1996 study of who cites librarianslooked at the 24 library and information science journals included inJournal Citation Reports with impact factors greater than .4. Theyfound that 86.6% of the citations to journal articles in library science ar-ticles were to library science journals as based on the Social SciencesCitation Index categories of subjects. Bracken and Tucker8 examinedthe citations in 187 articles on bibliographic instruction published inthirteen library science journals to determine the extent to which au-thors cited sources from library and information science versus othersubjects. They found 74.43% of all citations cited library sciencesources. In our own study, we found approximately 72% of all citationsto serials were to those in the library and information science field.

Bonnevie9 in her 2003 article defined self-citation of a journal as “thepercentage of citations to papers from the same journal out of papersfrom all journals” and found that for the Journal of Information Sciencethat rate was 5.1%. Also, according to Scholegl and Stock10 in their2004 study of the impact and relevance of U.S. journals the self-citation

Steven L. Johns and Diana D. Shonrock 213

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rate for LIS journals varied from 22.8% to 0.0%. Some commonly citedLIS journals had the following self-citation rates: College & ResearchLibraries, 12.4%; Journal of Academic Librarianship, 3.8%; and Refer-ence & User Services Quarterly (formerly RQ), 7.8%.

HYPOTHESES

The purpose of this study was to use changes in citation patterns ofthe research articles in Research Strategies to identify changes in thereputation of the journal as a research journal. This article will look athow the journal has changed/evolved over the first sixteen volumes bythe following means:

• Examining the types of articles included in the journal to see ifthere has been a growth in the quantity of research articles.

• Examining the citations of articles published in the journal to de-termine the age, and type (monograph, serial, or other).

• Examining the ISI citations to Research Strategies articles forchanges in frequency over time.

Our hypotheses were as follows:

• The research being done in the fields of library instruction, biblio-graphic instruction, and information literacy had grown as evi-denced by an increase in the number of research articles publishedin Research Strategies.

• The stature of the research in the field had expanded as evidencedby an increase in the number of times the Research Strategies re-search articles had been cited by ISI library science journals andISI journals in other fields such as information technology and ed-ucation.

• The overall percentage of research articles in Research Strategieshad increased over the first sixteen volumes as had the number oftimes the articles were cited in ISI journals.

METHODOLOGY

Beginning with volume 17 Research Strategies changed both the edi-tor and the publisher; therefore, our analysis of articles will be limited to


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articles published in the first 16 volumes and will focus on three aspectsof each article: authorship, cited references, and article type. The printversion was used only to define what constituted an article and to cap-ture article attributes. Each Research Strategies’ table of contents pageclearly identifies which pieces are research articles, and which are edi-torials, columns, features, or other items. Editorials were often includedin the article section of the table of contents; however, we decided at theoutset not to include editorials in this study. Microsoft Excel spread-sheets were used to record the data gathered pertaining to each article.In addition, ISI citation counts were used to determine both which arti-cles were being cited and by what other journals.

Authorship

For each article, all contributing authors were classified according togender, and the total number of contributing authors was recorded.First-named authors only were further classified into one of five catego-ries according to institutional affiliation: public library, academic li-brary, school library (K-12), corporate library, and other (e.g., retired,unemployed, student). Also recorded, for the first author only, were thefollowing details: institution name, category of professional affiliation(practicing librarian; library school faculty; and other, such as retired li-brarian, or non-librarian), and position title. All of this information wasas self-disclosed by the author(s) at the time of publication, and shownat the bottom of the first page of each article, per Research Strategies’standard format.

Citations

A total number of unique citations from each article was recorded,and citations were classified into three types: material from serials,monographs or material from them, and other. Citations were alsosorted into three categories by age: 0-5 years; 6-10 years; and over 10years. Age was as of the time of publication of the citing article. Cita-tions described as “submitted for publication” were placed in the 0-5year category.

Material from serials included newspaper articles; magazine and jour-nal articles, features, and columns; numbered reports/bulletins/newslet-ters; and content from other types of serials and series, for example, ARLSpec Kits. Monographs included books, chapters or parts of anthologies(as long as they had different titles and authors), monographic series likeERIC Documents, and anything described as a handbook or manual.


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The “other” category included speeches, statements, addresses, presen-tations, attributed remarks, proceedings, minutes, workshops, proposals,letters, theses and dissertations, and anything described as unpublished: re-ports, papers, commercial software, computer programs, listserv posts,Web pages, Web sites, user guides, research guides, handouts (mimeo-graphed or not), videocassettes, poster sessions, interviews, personal tele-phone conversations, personal comments to the author, things mentionedin conference sessions, and studies prepared for foundations.

Not counted as citations were explanatory material, comments, facts,figures, suggestions, sample questions, sample answers, addresses,phone numbers, contact information, acknowledgements, thank yous,and anything not attributed to a specific source–for example, unattrib-uted private conversations.

In the section of the paper looking at the citation patterns of otherjournals citing Research Strategies, data from the ISI Citation Reportswere used as the measure of changes in the frequency of citation and thejournals doing the citing.

Article Type

All articles were sorted into five categories by type: (empirical) re-search, analytical essay, opinion, bibliography, and “how-to” (some-times referred to as a “how-we-did-it-good” article). Research articleswere defined as those employing an empirical process, where observa-tions or events were recorded (often by survey), quantified, and ana-lyzed. Where analysis of a topic was present, but not empirical research,the article was placed in the analytical essay category. Opinion pieceswere defined as those in which the author’s knowledge or experiencewas the underlying basis for the article. Opinion pieces were often, butnot always, identified as such by the editor. They were also identifiableby a small number, or complete lack of, citations. Articles in the how-to,or how-we-did-it-good category were fairly easy to define and identi-fied as anything describing a process or change in the author’s own in-stitution, or recommending a method for a process or change to others.For articles that seemed to have aspects of more than one category, onebest-fit category was chosen.

ISI Citation Data

In addition to examining the articles in the first 16 volumes of Re-search Strategies and their citations as we also looked for changes in the


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publishing patterns of the journal, we also looked at the citation patternsfor the research articles–how are other authors using them and how thatmay have changed. Using citation data from ISI’s Citation Database forthe end of 2005, we examined the citation patterns for the articles citingResearch Strategies, looking at both the most cited articles as well asthe journals that published the articles citing Research Strategy articles.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Author Analysis

The 253 articles comprising the first 16 volumes of Research Strate-gies were written by 404 authors, 293 female (73%) and 111 male (27%)(see Table 1). These numbers include all contributing authors, not justthe first-named author.

Hofacre’s study of a 10-year run (1993-2003) of the American Archi-vist found that 142 authors wrote 161 articles.11 Some authors writemore than one article, and far less collaboration was present among ar-chivists and others writing for this journal than for Research Strategies.Siddiqui found 163 articles were written by a total of 294 authors, a ratioof authors to articles similar to our own findings.12 Although Hofacre didnot examine author gender, Siddiqui found that of the 294 authors, 70.0%were male, and 23.5% were female (he was unable to establish gender ofthe remaining 6.5%),13 almost the reverse of our own analysis.

Buttlar, in surveying 1,725 articles published in 16 library periodi-cals for the period of 1987-1989, found that even though library sciencewas “female-dominated,” out of 2,072 authors, 961 (47.83%) weremale, and 1,048 (52.17%) were female.14 Research Strategies authorswere significantly more female-dominated than the authors in Buttlar’sstudy with 73% being female compared with Buttlar’s 52%.15


TABLE 1. Authorship by Gender (All Authors)

Author Gender Number Percentage

Male 111 27

Female 293 73

Total 404 100

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Although the gender numbers we found for Research Strategies mightlead one to think that men wrote roughly one-fourth of all the articles,women, writing alone or in concert with other women, actually accountedfor slightly over 60% of all articles. The most common mode of author-ship was women as sole authors, accounting for 37.5% of all articles. Al-though Buttlar did not break down author combinations by gender, theresults of her survey showed 60.58% of articles written by single authors,a slightly larger percentage of single-author articles than the 54.5% forResearch Strategies.16 One of the least prevalent modes of authorshipwas two or more men writing together, at slightly above 2%. In this ex-amination of the journal, women show far greater propensity for writingwith a coauthor or in groups than men; women writing with one or morecoauthors, regardless of gender, accounted for approximately 40% of allarticles. Table 2 shows the most common authorship combinations.

In our analysis of the type of library in which authors worked, onlythe first-named authors’ institutional affiliations were captured, andthey were categorized using six institution categories for authors: aca-demic, corporate, public, school (K-12), special libraries (includinggovernment libraries), and other (for authors who were retired, unem-ployed, and so forth). In retrospect, not as many categories would beneeded, as analysis showed an overwhelming affiliation with academiclibraries, with 248 out of 253 first-named authors (98%), were workingin academic libraries. This, perhaps, is not to be unexpected since manyacademic libraries use publication records to make hiring decisions and


TABLE 2. Authorship by Gender Combinations

Authors Number of Articles Percentage of Articles

1F 95 37.5

2F 48 19.0

1M 44 17.0

1F 2M 40 16.0

3F 9 3.5

2M 5 2.0

Various other combinations 12 5.0

Total 253 100.0

F = Female; M = Male.Percentages rounded to nearest 0.5 percent.

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promotion and tenure decisions; however, LIRT is an organization for in-struction librarians from all types of libraries, so one might have expectedthe authors to be more representative of this factor. Furthermore, inthree instances where the first-named author worked in either a publicor corporate library, there was a coauthor that worked in an academic li-brary. Here Research Strategies showed a far higher percentage of au-thors from academic libraries than in Buttlar’s survey, where 61% ofauthors were found to be academic librarians.17 While her findings areincompletely summarized, Hofacre18 found a higher proportion of au-thors from academic institutions, perhaps as high as 90%, than Buttlar.Although Siddiqui included all authors in analyzing institutional affilia-tion, not just the first-named author as we did, that study also found amajority of authors affiliated with academic libraries.19

Considering the first-named author only, 159 academic librarieswere represented by the authors of the 253 articles analyzed. The Uni-versity of Illinois was first among specific academic libraries, account-ing for 11 articles, and the State University of New York (SUNY)system is first among college/university systems with 10 articles. Table 3shows the academic affiliation of first-named authors, and number of ar-ticles written, down to an incidence of four articles.


TABLE 3. Authorship* by Specific Academic Institution or University System

University of Illinois 11SUNY system 10Rutgers University 7CUNY system 6Ohio State University system 6Bowling Green State University 5Ohio State University 5University of California system 5University of Hawaii 5University of Minnesota 5Western Michigan University 5California State University system 4Iowa State University 4Pennsylvania State University system 4University of North Carolina 4University of Wisconsin system 4Virginia Polytechnic & State University 4

*First-named authors only.

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Reference Citation Analysis

The 253 research articles in the first 16 volumes of Research Strate-gies cited 2,491 unique references. A unique reference is defined here asany reference to a monograph, journal article, or other type of source.If a monograph, journal article, etc., were cited more than once in a sin-gle article, it was counted only once. If, however, a subsequent Re-search Strategies article cited the same monograph or journal articlecited by a prior article, that cite was counted again (one time), as a cita-tion for that subsequent article. Three categories for references werechosen: serial, monograph, and other. Table 4 shows the number of totalreferences in each category. Of the 2,491 references, 1,469 (59.2%)were for serials, 848(34.1%) were for monographs and 166 (6.7%) wereother. In the volumes examined for this study no electronic or Web pagecitations were included.

The data in Table 4 groups the references into age categories of 0-5years, 6-10 years, and over 10 years, at time of publication. For the first16 volumes of Research Strategies, the most current category of ref-erences was the “other” category, with 67% (112 of 166) of references0-5 years old. The next most current category was serials, with 52%(762 of 1469) references 0-5 years old at time of publication. Mono-graphs represented the oldest category of reference, and were the onlycategory of reference in which the zero-to-five-year group was not thelargest.

This pattern remained fairly consistent over time. For every year inthe study, the zero-to-five-year group was the largest, and for all but oneyear the six-to-ten-year group was larger than the over-ten-year group.These findings support those of Ginn,20 who found that most cited


TABLE 4. All References: By Type, Age, and Percents of Total (to NearestPercent)

0-5Years

Percentageof Total

6-10Years

Percentageof Total

� 10Years

Percentageof Total

Total

Serials 762 52 447 30 260 18 1469Monographs 273 32 310 37 265 31 848Other 112 67 33 20 21 13 166*Total 1147 46 790 32 546 22 2483

*The difference (8 references) between this “other” number and the total number of “other” references dis-cussed earlier is due to undated references.

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works, more than 50% in her study, were ten years old or less; however,our percentage of items in this age group was 78%, or substantiallyhigher than Ginn’s. These findings may be the result of the newness ofthe field of research, and the limited number of journal outlets for pub-lishing, in library instruction. Table 5 shows the age of serial refer-ences only, by year and Research Strategies volume number. Table 5also shows what percentage of that year’s total serial references are rep-resented by the number in each of the three age groups.

A total of 329 different serial titles were cited in the first sixteen vol-umes of Research Strategies; however, only 18 titles were cited 10times or more. Clearly, Research Strategies authors cited a wide varietyof serials, yet those 18 titles (see Table 6) account for 60% (889 of1,469) of all serial references. Just four titles–Research Strategies, Col-lege & Research Libraries, Reference & User Services Quarterly, andJournal of Academic Librarianship–accounted for 41% (603 of 1,469)total serial references.

Ginn,21 in analyzing 36 articles published in Library & Informa-tion Science Research (LISR), 2001-2002, hypothesized that citations to


TABLE 5. Serial References Only, Year/Volume and Age

Year/Volume 0-5Years

Percentageof Total

6-10Years

Percentageof Total

� 10Years

Percentageof Total

Total

1983/1 24 57 10 24 8 19 421984/2 22 51 13 30 8 19 431985/3 23 70 8 24 2 6 331986/4 53 80 6 9 7 11 661987/5 20 43 19 41 7 15 461988/6 34 58 22 37 3 5 591989/7 42 51 27 33 13 16 821990/8 63 49 48 38 17 13 1281991/9 45 41 33 30 31 28 1091992/10 26 55 11 23 10 21 471993/11 78 54 49 34 18 12 1451994/12 65 40 59 36 39 24 1631995/13 49 48 35 35 17 17 1011996/14 51 52 28 28 20 20 991997/15 63 56 31 27 19 17 1131998/16 104 54 48 25 41 21 193Total 762 447 260 1,469

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articles previously published in LISR (what Bonnevie calls self-citation)would be relatively low, no more than 5% of the total. In fact, she foundcitations to previous LISR articles to be 2.96% of all citations, provingher hypothesis. This in no way led us to expect the 14.5% we found as thepercentage of times authors cited prior articles in Research Strategies.Schoegl and Stock in their study found an average of 5.9% self-citationfor LIS journals, and Bonnevie in her study of the Journal of InformationScience found a self-citation rate of 4.8%; all of these considerably lessthan the 14.5% for Research Strategies as shown in Table 6.

In addition, in Research Strategies, a high percentage of citationswas found to College & Research Libraries (11.4%), Reference & UserServices Quarterly (8.5%), and Journal of Academic Librarianship(6.7%). Table 6 shows the serial titles most commonly referenced byResearch Strategies, down to an incidence of 10 times.


TABLE 6. Serial Titles Most Cited* by Articles Published in Research Strategies

Serial Title No. of Times Cited Percentage of TotalCitations to Serials

Research Strategies 213 14.5College & Research Libraries 167 11.4Reference & User Services Quarterly** 125 8.5Journal of Academic Librarianship 98 6.7Library Trends 41 2.8Reference Services Review 40 2.7The Reference Librarian 31 2.1College & Research Libraries News 30 2.0Library Journal 26 1.8Online 20 1.4College English 15 1.0Information Technologies and Libraries 15 1.0Journal of the American Society forInformation Science

14 0.9

Library & Information Science Research 13 0.9Computers in Libraries 11 0.7Educational Technology 11 0.7American Libraries 10 0.7Libri 10 0.7

*All titles cited ten or more times are included.**Formerly RQ, citations to which are included in the count.

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Article Type Analysis

All articles in the first 16 volumes of Research Strategies were sortedinto five categories: empirical research, analytical essay, opinion, bibli-ography, and “how-to.” The most common article type was found to be‘how-to," followed by empirical research. Table 7 shows the distribu-tion of article type by year and volume.

If these numbers are considered in four-year increments, the percent-age of articles that were published in Research Strategies has increasedfrom 19.4% in the years 1983-1986 to 37.5% in the years 1995-1998.However, the number of how-to articles and analytical essays has re-mained relatively stable, indicating a continuing need for an outlet forthis type of article as well. Actually, the year 1998 also included thehighest percentage of how-to articles with 12 of 22 articles, or 54.5%.In addition, analytical essays accounted for 27% of the total articlespublished.


TABLE 7. Article Type–by Year/Volume

Year/Volume Howto

AnalyticalEssay

EmpiricalResearch

Opinion Bibliography TotalArticles

ResearchArticles asPercentage

of Total

1983/1 4 7 2 2 15 13

1984/2 9 3 4 16 25

1985/3 5 5 1 2 13 8

1986/4 3 5 5 4 1 18 28

1987/5 2 4 6 1 13 46

1988/6 5 1 6 2 14 43

1989/7 9 2 4 15 27

1990/8 8 6 2 1 17 12

1991/9 3 7 4 14 29

1992/10 2 4 3 1 10 30

1993/11 9 7 4 20 20

1994/12 5 4 7 16 44

1995/13 4 5 7 3 19 37

1996/14 6 2 7 15 47

1997/15 6 2 8 16 50

1998/16 12 5 5 22 23

Total 92 69 75 15 2 253 30

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Citation Analysis

The analysis of journals citing a specific journal is another method oflooking at the changes in a journal. The ISI Web of Science citation re-cords provide information on which ISI-indexed journals are citing Re-search Strategies and how that has changed. Articles published in thefirst sixteen volumes of Research Strategies have been cited in articlesindexed in ISI from 1983 through 2005 353 times. Table 8 shows the in-stitutional affiliations of the first author of the articles citing ResearchStrategies articles, at the time of the article was written. The first institu-tion on this list was the University of Illinois, which is the same as thefirst institution on the list of author affiliations. Other institutions withauthors most frequently citing Research Strategies articles are RutgersUniversity and Penn State. All three institutions have stringent promo-tion and tenure requirements. First author institutions in Table 8 are forall authors with at least five articles citing Research Strategies.


TABLE 8. Institution of the First Author of Articles Citing Research StrategiesArticles

Author’s Institution Number of CitingRS Articles

Percentage of TotalCiting Articles*

University of Illinois 14 4.0

Penn State University 10 2.8

Rutgers University 7 2.0

University of Alberta 6 1.7

UCLA 6 1.7

University of Western Ontario 6 1.7

Kent State University 5 1.7

Purdue University 5 1.4

St. Olaf College 5 1.4

SUNY Albany 5 1.4

University of California at Berkeley 5 1.4

University of Hawaii at Manoa 5 1.4

University of Toronto 5 1.4

Note: Articles published in the first 16 volumes of Research Strategies have been cited in articles indexed inISI from 1983 through 2005 353 times. The home institution of the first author, at the time of the article beingwritten, is noted in this table. First author institutions are included here for all authors with at least five citingarticles.*Of 353 total citing articles.

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Of the 353 articles, 47 (13.3%) citing Research Strategies were writ-ten by just 12 authors. Some of the authors most frequently citing Re-search Strategies articles in their own articles are shown in Table 9.Some of the names such as Diane Nahl-Jakobovits and H. Julien and L.Arp are widely known in the field and broadly cited in ISI.

As shown in Table 10, there is a core of journals citing articles in Re-search Strategies and 43.6% of the citations were in three journals, Col-lege & Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, andReference & User Services Quarterly.

Another factor of interest was the field of the journals whose authorsare citing the articles from Research Strategies as shown in Table 11. Ofthe journals containing citation to Research Strategies, 82.7% are clas-sified by ISI as “Information Science & Library Science,” 11.3% asComputer Science/Information Systems, 5.1% as Education, and 4% asComputer Science/Cybernetics. The total is more than 100% becausesome journals are included in more than one ISI subject category.

The number of times in five-year increments the articles from Re-search Strategies have been cited in ISI Citation Reports are shown inTable 12. As of 2005, only six articles published in the issues from 1985and before had been cited in other ISI articles; however, the research


TABLE 9. Authors of Articles Most Frequently Citing Research StrategiesArticles

Authors Citations Percentage*

Nahl-Jakobovits, D. 7 1.9

Julien, H. 6 1.7

Arp, L. 5 1.4

Christensen, B. 4 1.1

Jacobson, TE. 4 1.1

Cheney, D. 3 0.8

Dilevko, J. 3 0.8

Jiao, QG. 3 0.8

Leckle, GJ 3 0.8

Onwuegbuzle, AJ. 3 0.8

Owusu-Ansah, EK. 3 0.8

Tenopir, C. 3 0.8

*Of 353 total citing articles.

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TABLE 12. Articles Cited by Publication Year

Publication Year of Cited Article Number of Articles Percentage of Total

1985 and before 6 1.71986-1990 44 12.51991-1995 79 22.41996-2000 91 25.82001-2005 133 37.7Total 353 100.1*

*Does not equal 100% due to rounding.

TABLE 11. ISI Subject Categories of Journals Citing Research Strategies

Categories Number of Articles Percentage of Total*

Information Science 292 82.7Computer Science & InformationSystems

40 11.3

Education 18 5.1Computer Science Cybernetics 14 4.0

*Does not total 100% because (1) Journals may be included in more than one ISI subject category, and(2) Only ISI subject categories that included citations to over 2% of Research Strategy articles areincluded.

TABLE 10. Journals Most Often Citing Articles Published in Research Strategies

Citing Journal Number of Times Percentage*

College & Research Libraries 58 16.4Journal of Academic Librarianship 54 15.3Reference & User Services Quarterly** 42 11.9Library Trends 28 7.9Portal: Libraries and the Academy 14 4.0Library & Information Science Research 11 3.1Journal of the American Society forInformation Science and Technology

11 3.1

Annual Review of Information Scienceand Technology

5 1.4

*Of 353 total citing articles.**Formerly RQ, from which citing articles are included.

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articles published since 2001 have been cited 133 times, 37.7% of thetotal number of citations.

Citation counts were introduced as a measure of quality (Najman,2003, p.68). The most cited article in the first 16 volumes of ResearchStrategies according to the ISI counts is the Teresa B. Mensching’s arti-cle, “Trends in BI in the 1980’s,”22 which was cited 13 times. Other arti-cles from Research Strategies cited ten times or more are Joy Thomas’sarticle “Faculty Attitudes and Habits”23 and Jill Coupe’s article “Under-graduate Library Skills.”24 Of the citations in ISI to Research Strate-gies, 163 of 353 citations, or 46.2%, have been to the 75 research arti-cles published in the first 16 volumes.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONSFOR FURTHER RESEARCH

In our hypotheses, we stated that, for a number of reasons, the reputa-tion and scholarly nature of Research Strategies had increased over theyears of its publication. One of these reasons was that it had been able toattract and publish an increasingly higher proportion of research arti-cles, as opposed to all other types of articles, in its issues. As can be seenin the empirical research column in Table 10, the number of research ar-ticles published annually did increase, generally, from 1983 to 1998.Figure 1, shows the number of research articles published annuallyfrom 1983 to 1998.


8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

01983 1985 1987 1989

Research articles

1991 1993 1995 1997

FIGURE 1. Research Articles Published in Research Strategies by Year

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Sharon Hogan and Mary George edited Research Strategies fromvolume one, issue one (winter 1983), to volume eight, issue one (winter1990). During their tenure as editors, the number of research articlespublished each year began to increase, but then tapered off to where itbegan. Barbara Wittkopf edited Research Strategies from volume eight,issue two (spring 1990), to volume fifteen, issue four (1997). During hertenure as editor, the journal experienced a fairly steady increase in thenumber of research articles published each year. Natalie Pelster editedResearch Strategies beginning with volume sixteen, issue one. During1998, her first year as editor, the journal experienced a drop off in re-search articles published from eight in 1997 to five in 1998.

So why or how did the number of research articles published in-crease? Certainly one way is through editor preference. If the editor oreditors of a journal want to attract and publish more of a type of articlethey can influence this by giving that type of article preference, or bysoliciting submission of a certain type of article, by the same means thatthey solicit articles of other types.

Another possible reason for an increase in research articles is thatthey are generally considered more scholarly. As more colleges anduniversities consider granting academic librarians (the overwhelmingcontributors of articles to Research Strategies, see Table 3) tenure,those same librarians have found their institutions’ expectations forthem in the area of scholarship on the rise.

In addition, it is also likely that technological advances, particularly inarea of personal computing, acted a catalyst to research, including libraryresearch. Apple and IBM computers came out in the late 1970s and early1980s. Electronic software packages such as Microsoft Word and Lotus1-2-3 (a product of the Lotus Development Corporation) were both re-leased in 1983. The power and speed of personal computers increasedradically throughout the late eighties and nineties. The first World WideWeb browser, Mosaic Netscape 0.9, was released in 1994.25 All thesedevolopments and others have contributed to the growth in publishing,but the field of library instruction has continued to have but a single dedi-cated journal. Although the percentage of research articles published inResearch Strategies did not grow as hypothesized, the journal continuedto publish research articles, and the how-to articles that seem to be thebread and butter of this field. What will happen now that the journal hasceased publication? What, if anything, will be the loss? Authors will findother outlets for their research, but what will be the future for the how-toand analytical essay articles? The membership of the two organizationshas more than doubled, indicating the strength of the field of instruction.


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Perhaps the World Wide Web will become the publishing outlet for thesetypes of materials. Further research will be needed to determine the effectthe Web has had on the publishing of how-to materials in this field and todetermine whether future articles and research on library instruction arebeing published or not.

NOTES

1. Michael Lorenzen, “A Brief History of Library Instruction in the UnitedStates,” Illinois Libraries 83, no. 2 (2001): 10.

2.. Lorenzen, “A Brief History,” 11.3. J. M. Najman, “The Validity of Publication and Citation Counts for Sociology

and Other Selected Disciplines,” Journal of Sociology 39, no. 1 (2003): 63.4. Moid A. Siddiqui, “A Bibliometric Study of Authorship Characteristics in Four

International Information Science Journals.” International Forum on Information andDocumentation 22, no. 3 (1997): 3-13.

5. Marta Jean Hofacre, “Bibliometric Study: Descriptive Authorship Statistics inThe American Archivist, 1993-2003, with a Bibliography of Selected Articles.” Mis-sissippi Libraries 68, no. 4 (2004): 97-102.

6. Linda Ginn, “Citation Analysis of Authored Articles in Library and InformationScience Research,” Mississippi Libraries 67, no. 4 (2001-2002): 106.

7. Terry Meyer and John Spencer, “A Citation Analysis Study of Library Science:Who Cites Librarians?” College and Research Libraries 57, no. 1 (1996): 23-33.

8. James K. Bracken and John Mark Tucker, “Characteristics of the Journal Litera-ture of Bibliographic Instruction.” College & Research Libraries 50, no. 6 (1989): 665-673.

9. Ellen Bonnevie, “A Multifaceted Portrait of a Library and Information ScienceJournal: the Case of the Journal of Information Science.” Journal of Information Sci-ence 29, no. 1 (2003): 11-23.

10. Christian Schoegl and Wolfgang G. Stock, “Impact and Relevance of LIS Jour-nals: A Scientometric Analysis of International and German-Language LIS Jour-nals–Citation Analysis versus Reader Survey.” Journal of the American Society forInformation Science and Technology 29 no. 13 (2004): 1155-1168.

11.. Hofacre, “Bibliometric Study,” 99.12. Siddiqui, “A Bibliometric Study of Authorship Characteristics,” 6.13. Siddiqui, “A Bibliometric Study of Authorship Characteristics,” 6.14. Lois Buttlar, “Analyzing the Library Periodical Literature: Content and Author-

ship,” College & Research Libraries 52, no. 1 (1991): 38.15. Buttlar, “Analyzing the Library,” 41.16. Buttlar, “Analyzing the Library,” 41.17. Buttlar, “Analyzing the Library,” 38.18. Hofacre, “Bibliometric Study,” 100.19. Siddiqui, “A Bibliometric Study of Authorship Characteristics,” 6.20. Ginn, “Citation Analysis,” 106 & 108.21. Ginn, “Citation Analysis,” 106.22. Teresa Mensching, “Trends in Bibliographic Instruction in the 1980’s: A Com-

parison of Data from Two Surveys,” Research Strategies 7, no. 1 (1989): 4-13.


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23. Joy Thomas, “Faculty Attitudes and Habits Concerning Library Instruction:How much has it changed since 1982?,” Research Strategies 12, no. 4 (1994): 209-223.

24. Jill Coupe, “Undergraduate Library Skills: Two Surveys at Johns Hopkins Uni-versity.” Research Strategies 11, no. 4 (1993): 188-201.

25. Rojas R., ed. Encyclopedia of Computers and Computer History (Vols. 1-2).Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.

doi:10.1300/J123v53n01_17


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