Preprint: "Relevance of Library Collections for Graduate Student Research: A Citation Analysis Study of Doctoral Dissertations at Notre Dame"

Full Text: Relevance of Library Collections for Graduate Student Research: A Citation Analysis Study of Doctoral Dissertations at Notre Dame
31 Pages; PDF

by Jessica Kayongo (University of Notre Dame) and  Clarence Helm (University of Notre Dame
Source: College and Research Libraries
Anticipated Publication Date: November, 2011

From the Abstract:

This study focused on determining the extent to which collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame met the needs of graduate students. This study data (2005-2007) consisted of a citation analysis of 248 dissertations and focused on the following questions: What were the graduate students citing in their dissertations? Did the library own the cited items? How did the disciplines compare in their citation patterns? The data showed that over 90% of the 39,106 citations were to books and journals. The Libraries owned 67% of the items graduate students cited in their dissertations. The Libraries owned 83% of the Arts & Humanities, 90% of the Engineering, 92% of the Science, and 75% of the Social Sciences sources in the top 1000 most cited titles, indicating a need for funding for further development of Social Sciences collections in the Hesburgh Libraries.

And Speaking of Citations…

1. New: SSRN’s [Social Science Research Network] CiteReader Reference and Citation Project (via E-Mail & a Zotero Forum)

We have been working on extracting references from all SSRN papers for 5 years as part of the CiteReader project that SSRN has undertaken with our development firm, ITX Corp. We have created a system to extract references and footnotes from PDF files on SSRN and to have that extracted data proofread by human beings. While this project is not yet complete, we are now announcing the release of over 6.7 million references extracted from the reference sections of over 182,000 papers on the SSRN site as well as over 4.2 million citations that we have linked to SSRN papers.– The references from each SSRN paper (where we have been able to extract them) can be found on the REFERENCES tab on the public abstract page for each paper.

– The citations we have matched to each SSRN paper are available on the CITATIONS tab on the public abstract page for the paper
– These reference links provide an excellent way for any reader to go back in the literature in any area, and the citation links provide an excellent way to go forward in the literature.

Data on the Current State of SSRN’s CiteReader™ Project

– Papers with Resolved References: 182,645 out of the 270,179 full text papers on SSRN
– Total References Resolved: 6,689,847
– SSRN Papers with Resolved Citations: 180,339
– Total Citation Links between the Cited and the Citing Paper: 4,277,354
– Papers with Resolved Footnotes: 60,721 (we are giving footnote extraction priority to papers with no reference section)
– Total Extracted Footnotes: 6,899,585

SSRN is now extracting footnotes from all papers while giving processing priority to those papers with no reference section. We have extracted over 6.9 million footnotes from over 60,000 papers with no Reference sections thus far. These footnotes and the references we extract from them will also be appearing in tabs on SSRN’s abstract pages. SSRN is now perfecting the algorithms for extracting references from these footnotes. The undercounting of citations from and to law papers will be resolved over the next year as our algorithms are perfected and references from papers with no reference section are extracted from footnotes and linked to the papers being cited.

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Data Files, Funding, Journal Articles, Libraries