Library Resources & Technical Services ISSN 0024-2527 January 2001 Volume 45, No. 1 ARTICLES Using Citation Analysis to Pursue a Core Collection of Journals for Communication Disorders 3 Steve Black Book Vendor Records in the OCLC Database 10 Boon or Bane? Laura D. Shedenhelm and Bartley A. Burk The Effect of Interface Design on Item Selection in an Online Catalog 20 David H. Thomas The Year’s Work in Cataloging, 1999 47 Amy K. Weiss and Timothy V. Carstens FEATURES Book Reviews 59 Margaret Rohdy, Editor From Carnegie to Internet2, reviewed by Bob Persing American Library From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure, Association reviewed by Sheila S. Intner Association for Library The Future of Cataloging, reviewed by Sheila S. Intner Collections & Technical Progress in Visual Information Access and Retrieval, Services reviewed by Sara Shatford Layne Visit LRTS online at Social Life of information, reviewed by Michael Gorman www.ala.org/alcts/lrts. 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The bibliometric concept of “success-breeds-success” is reviewed, and its application to this sample of journals is quantified. The special problems of defining a core collection in a multidisciplinary field are discussed. Data is also provided on the types of publications cited, and the age distribution of cited journals. he field of communication disorders encompasses the study of impairments Tand disabilities in speech, language, and hearing. The American Speech- Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), founded in 1925, accredits practition- ers, programs, and college and university graduate programs in communication disorders, and has 97,062 members (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 2000). ASHA’s Council of Academic Accreditation (2000) has accred- ited 253 graduate programs in the United States in speech-language pathology and audiology (www.asha.org/students/caa_programs/caaprog.htm). Communication disorders draws from multiple disciplines, yet it is clearly a discipline in its own right. It satisfies Kuhn’s (1996) characteristics of a discipline, having its own specialized journals, an established professional society, and a spe- cial place in the academic curriculum. Accredited professionals, students in pro- grams, and the libraries serving them need to access literature from a wide range of fields. The broad, multidisciplinary nature of communication disorders is demonstrated by the works cited in articles published in journals such as the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research and the Journal of Communication Disorders. Works cited in these communication-disorders jour- nals draw from publications in many fields, including audiology, neurology, lin- guistics, medicine, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, education, and special education. Steve Black ([email protected]) is Identifying the most important journals helps professionals use their time Reference, Instruction, and Serials efficiently, and helps libraries make the most of their budgets. Typically, an aca- Librarian, Neil Hellman Library, the demic library will develop a core collection of journals in each of the disciplines College of Saint Rose, Albany, New York. taught in the institution’s programs, and also subscribe to additional journals that Manuscript received January 27, 2000; strengthen and enhance the core collections. But defining a core collection is not accepted for publication May 15, easy. Many journals are used in more than one discipline, and titles often cease, 4 Black LRTS 45(1) merge, change names, or are newly created. Also, the qual- hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” ity of individual journals changes over time, so reputation Merton (1968) first described the Matthew Effect in terms may overestimate or underestimate the current quality of a of the disproportionate amount of attention given to the journal. work of the most prominent scientists. Models of journal citation distribution models all show a pattern of success- breeds-success, although there is no standard mathemati- Citation Analysis cal formula for the skewed distribution of cited works (Oluic-Vukovic 1997). Bensman and Wilder (1998) Citation analysis is an established method for identifying the described in some detail this and related expressions of the leading journals that belong in a discipline’s core collection. skewed distribution of citations, including “Bradford’s law Citation analysis is the systematic, quantitative study of of scattering,” “Garfield’s law of concentration,” and the works cited. It is part of the broader field of bibliometrics, negative binomial distribution. Other success-breeds-suc- the application of mathematical and statistical methods in cess “laws” have been devised by Pareto, Lotka, and Zipf the study of the use of documents and publication patterns (Oluic-Vukovic, 1997). (Osareh 1996). Osareh (1996) reviewed a body of citation All expressions