A CITATION ANALYSIS OF LIS SERIAL LITERATURE PUBLISHED IN DENMARK 1957–1986

Abstract

The focus of the citation analysis reported is the information exchange between the Danish library‐information profession and LIS communities in other countries. Consideration is given to the diffusion of ideas and innovations from foreign countries into the Danish LIS world. Citation evidence is also used to shed light on structural characteristics of the LIS periodical literature and other communication media and some of the communication patterns characterising the LIS field in Denmark. The raw material for the citation analysis was gathered by the manual citation counting method and not drawn from computerised citation databases. The fact that a surprisingly large proportion of the references cited by Danish LIS authors belong to the so‐called ‘hidden’ category — denoting cited references embedded in the text of journal papers — is noted as a key finding. The observation on the considerable number of ‘hidden’ citations is developed further. Journals and books (monographs) are the publication formats most frequently relied on by LIS authors. It was found that the majority of the citations are to relatively recent materials. Next to Danish material, publications in English and produced in the United States and in Great Britain are those most heavily relied on by the Danish LIS community. Ranking of journals by number of citations shows that a very small number of journals accounts for the majority of journal citations. On the whole, the works cited point to a definite interest in public libraries and issues relating to the planning, structure and legislation of public libraries. Works on research and academic libraries and on theoretical aspects of LIS did not attract the same amount of citations.