..

Journal CollectionManagement as a

Cumulative Advantage ProcessStephen J.Bensman

Thispaper outlinesa problem confrontingacademiclibraries:theexponentialgrowthin thenumber of journals and the inflationary surge in their prices. It then establishesa theoreticalframework for the solution of this problem by showing how the concentration of usage on arelatively small proportion of a library's journal holdings is a function of a series of sociobib-liometric laws basedon the principle of cumulative advantage. The paper argues that theselaws are operativenot only in library usage but also in the socialstratification of scholarship,and it posesthe hypothesis that the concentration ofjournal usage in academiclibrariesis par-tiallya reflectionof the processof the formation of scholarlyelites. Describedthroughout thepresentation.is the increasingly central role beingplayed by the citation indexes produced bythe Institute for Scientific Information in both academicevaluation and librarycollectiondevel-opment. The paper concludes by showing the practical implications of the sociobibliometriclaws for the management of journal collectionsin academiclibraries.

erials represent an almost insol- If both their number and price are rela-uble problem for academic li- tively stable, the continuous nature ofbraries. The second edition of journals does not pose a problem for aca-the Anglo-AmericanCataloguing demiclibraries. However, neither of these

Rules (AACR2), which is presently in conditions holds. In respect to their num-force, defines a serial in the following ber, journals manifest a tendency towardmanner: exponential growth. This tendency was

A publication in any medium issued in succes- analyzed by the n?ted scienc~ historiansive parts bearing numerical or chronological ~erek J. de SollaPrIce,wh~ estImated thatdesignations and intended to be continued in- sroce 1665-the year that wItnessed the es-definitely. Serials include periodicals; newspa- tablishment of the scientific journal withpers; annuals (reports,yearbooks,etc.); the the publication ofthe PhilosophicalTransac-journals, ~e~lOirs, proceedings, transaction~, tions of the Royal Society in London andetc:, o~soaeties; and numbered monographic the JournaldesSfIlvansin Paris-the num-senes. ber of scientific journals has increased

with extraordinary regularity by a factor often every fifty years and with a doublingperiod every fifteen years. 2 AlthoughPrice's estimate is inflated, because hefailed to exclude from his calculationsthose titles that ceased publication, his ba-sic conclusion on the exponential increaseof journals was corroborated by a study of

In this definition the key phrase is "in-tended to be continued indefinitely."Consequently, since journals are a subsetof serials, new subscriptions to them be-come a fixed cost in the materials budget,unlike books or monographs, which rep-resent a variable cost as onetime pur-chases.

Stephen J. Bensman is social sciences bibliographer, Troy H. Middleton Library, Louisiana State University,Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803.

13

14 College & Research Libraries

social science liter~ture headed byMaurice B. Line, the director general ofthe British Library Lending Division(BLLD). This study found that the averageannual growth rate of social science serialtitles between 1820 and 1970 was 3.44 per-cent per anum.3 Such a rate of increaseleads to a doubling period every twenty-one years.

The exponential character of serialsgrowth is reflected in the constantly ex-panding coverage of the standard libraryreference work for journals, Ulrich's Inter-national Periodicals Directory. When thefirst edition of Ulrich's appeared in 1932, itindexed 6,000 titles representing "the pe-riodicals published in the United Statesand foreign countries, especially in En-gland, France and Germany, which havebeen found most useful in American col-lections. ,,4 By 1963 the number of titleshad increased to 19,776, grouped under215 subject classifications, and the cover-age was widened to "selected periodicalsfrom all foreign countries, including ex-tensive representations from Czechoslo-vakia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Yugo-slavia, " as well as "new countries whichhave recently gained their indepen-dence. ,,5Twenty-one years later, the 1984edition of Ulrich's indexed some 66,000periodicals published throughout theworld, having added approximately 4,750titles since the previous edition, and itclassified these periodicals under 557 sub-ject headings.6 Ever since its inception,Ulrich's has not covered such serials asproceedings, transactions, reports, hand-books, annuals, and monographic seriesthat are issued less than twice a year.These items, which constitute a twilightzone between books and journals, came tobe covered in a companion volume enti-tled Irregular Serials & Annuals, and the1984 edition of this work listed 34,000 ad-ditional titles.7

Although the multiplying number ofjournals would alone pose a threat to aca-demic library budgets, it has become par-ticularly menacing when combined withthe inflationary surge that has occurred inperiodical subscription rates over recentyears. The extent of this surge can begauged from the annual survey of the cost

January 1985

of U.s. periodicals that is published in Li-braryJournal under the sponsorship of theLibrary Materials Price Index Committeeof the Resources Section of the AmericanLibrary Association's Resources andTechnical Services Division. Using theyears 1967-69 as a base, this surveyshowed that the average price of an Amer-ican periodical had increased 183.9 per-cent by 1977, from $8.66 to $24.59. Chem-istry and physics journals led the way,rising 283.0 percent in average price, from$24.48 to $93.76, to become the most ex-pensive category of U. S. periodicals. 8 Thesituation has not improved. The base yearis now 1977, but even with this change, itwas revealed that by 1984 the averageprice of a U.S. periodical had increased123.5 percent to $54.97. Chemistry andphysics journals still remained the mostexpensive of any subject group,-rising144.1 percent to an average price of$228.90. However, their rate of increaseduring this latter period was surpassed bylabor and industrial relations journals,which rose 165.7 percent in average price,from $11.24 to $29.87, as well as by medi-cal journals; which increased 144.7 per-cent in average price, from $51.31 to$125.57.9 Overall, from 1967-69 to 1984,the average cost of an Americanperiodicalrose from $8.66to $54.97,or 534.8percent.

Confronted with this exponential andinflationary mass, academic libraries ingeneral have not been able to respond in asystematic manner. The reasons are pri-marily political, administrative, and emo-tional. First of all, academic libraries areunder constant pressure from the faculty,who must "publish or perish" and there-fore have a vested interest in the flourish-ing of journals. Moreover, library serialsrecords and accounting systems are com-plex and inflexible, making it difficult forlibrarians to make decisions in regard totheir subscription lists. This difficulty iscompounded by the addiction of librari-ans to orderly systems and their concomi-tant reluctance to disrupt the" numericalor chronological designations" that dis-tinguish the separate parts of a serial. 10

Another confounding factor is that aca-demic libraries are measured by statisticsthat confuse the quality of library collec-

tions with their size, and a key variable inthese statistics is the number of current se-rials received by a library.l1 All of theabove considerations have combined tomake academic libraries willing to pay thehigher institutional rates for journals. Asthe purchasing power of their budgetsshrank, libraries faced a crisis that theywere not able to resolve, and there was aconstant shift of funds from the mono-graph budget to the serials budget as aca-demic libraries began to sacrifice the bookfor the journal.12 These trends are evidentin the data recently published by the Na-tional Center for Education Statistics(NCES) on some three thousand collegeand university libraries in the UnitedStates for the period between academicyears 1978-79 and 1981-82. According toNCES figures, whereas the general infla-tion rate was 37.3 percent during thesethree years, the total operating expendi-tures of college and university libraries in-creased only 30.4 percent. Moreover,these statistics revealed that the numberof new periodical subscriptions rose 3.0percent, while expenditures for periodi-cals increased a stunning 44.7 percent. Incontrast, NCES reported tnat although ex-penditures for books rose 14.6 percent atthe same time, acquisitions of book vol-umes and titles actually decreased by 9.1percent and 11.6 percent, respectively,and it noted that this decrease in book ac-quisitions continued a decline that beganin 1972-73.13

THE SOLUTION

A solution to the dilemma posed for aca-demic libraries by the explosive growth ofserials in both numbers and price may liein the development of a new science calledbibliometrics. The term bibliometrics wascoined in 1969 by Alan Pritchard, who de-fined it as "the application of mathematicsand statistical methods to books and othermedia of communication.' ,14 Bibliometricswas developed primarily for the naturalsciences, but lately has also been appliedto the social sciences and humanities. Afundamental feature of the new sciencehas been the positing of a series of lawsthat share the common characteristic ofconcentration-whether of library materi-

Journal Collection 15

als usage, author productivity, dispersalof articles on a given subject over the uni-verse of journals, or citations-on a rela-tively small stratum. IS The highly skeweddistributions resulting from the bibliome-tric laws have been found in a broad rangeof fields, such as biology, economics, ge-ography, and linguistics, and it has beensuggested that one reason for the recur-rence of these laws is that they are verystable and liable to result from many dif-ferent causes.16

Credit for revealing the concentration oflibrary usage on a relatively few items isgenerally given to Richard W. Trueswell, aprofessor of industrial engineering, whoanalyzed the circulation of materials atpublic, special, and university libraries.As a result of his investigations, Trueswellstated that library usage conforms to theso-called 80/20 Rule, whereby, for anygiven time period, 80 percent of the circu-lation is satisfied by 20 percent of the hold-ings. According to Trueswell, this patternof library circulation corresponds to onethat has been discovered in business in-ventories, by which 80 percent of ware-house transactions involve only 20 per-cent of the stocked items and 80 percent ofthe sales income is produced by 20 percentof the product line. In his investigations,Trueswell noted that a large proportion ofa library's holdings were never used, andhe found in one case that 99 percent of thecirculation demand was satisfied by about60 percent of the collection.17

Trueswell's findings were confirmed ina highly controversial study of the use oflibrary materials that was done at the Uni-versity of Pittsburgh during the latter partof the 1970s. This study involved the anal-ysis of monograph usage at the HillmanLibrary, a central research library empha-sizing the humanities and social sciences,as well as of journal usage at sixbranch sci-ence and engineering libraries. The Hill-man Library investigation traced thecomplete circulation history of 36,864monographs acquired between 1969 and1975. When these monographs wereranked in descending order of uses duringthis period and a conversion to cumulativepercentages was made, the following dis-tribution was found: 10.7 percent of the

16 College & Research Libraries

monographs accounted for 50.7 percent ofthe uses; 26.8 percent of the monographs,for 82.2 percent of the uses; 45.8 percent ofthe monographs, for 96.3 percent of theuses; and 60.1 percent of the monographs,for 100.0 percent of the uses. Some 14,697,or 39.9 percent, of these monographsnever circulated.18A similarconcentrationeffect was disclosed by the analysis ofjournal usage in the University of Pitts-burgh study. The six branch libraries in-volved in this part of the study were theChemistry Library, Computer Science Li-brary, Engineering Library, Life SciencesLibrary, Mathematics Library, and Phys-ics Library, and the proportion of the jour-nal holdings accounting for 100.0 percentof the usage ranged from a low of 6.8 per-cent in the Engineering Library to a high of36.9percent in the Physics Library.19

An extremely interesting phenomenonis that the pattern of interlibrary loans con-centrates in the same manner as the usageof materials in individual libraries. Thishas been revealed in a series of studiesconducted in recent years at BLLD, whichprovides support to over five thousanddomestic libraries and as many as seventhousand libraries abroad, annually proc-essing 2.8 million requests that encom-pass an estimated 75 percent of the interli-brary loan demand within the UnitedKingdom and 50 percent of all interna-tional interlibrary loan transactions. Thefirst study involved an analysis of a sam-ple of 61,333 requests for serials literaturereceived during a three-month period in1975. Of these requests, 59,617 were for14,718 titles actually located at BLLD.Among the 59,617 requests, 50 percentwere for just over 1,300 titles, in spite ofthe fact that BLLD was then receiving over45,000 titles and held more than 100,000 ti-tles. Moreover, only 34 percent of the re-quested titles accounted for 80 percent ofthe demand, and this 34 percent com-prised a mere 10 percent of the titles cur-rently received by BLLD and only 5 per-cent of all the titles held by that library.

What made these findings particularlysignificant was that an examination of thetitles most in demand at BLLD showedthem to be high-status scientific journalswith large circulations that were well es-

January 1985

tablished and widely held by local li-braries.2OThe 1975BLLD serials study wasreplicated in 1980 and again in 1983, andsimilar results were obtained. Thus, of18,975 titles requested from BLLD duringthe 1980 survey, 1,939, or 10.2 percent,satisfied 50 percent of the 63,491 requests;whereas in the 1983 study, 2,158, or 11.7percent, of the 18,465 requested titles ac-counted for 50 percent of the 61,946 re-quests.21 The implications of these analy-ses of serials usage at BLLD have beenhighlighted by the finding of Gordon Wil-liams, former director of the Center for Re-search Libraries in Chicago, that the jour-nals most requested for interlibrary loancorrespond closely to those most used inindividuallibraries.22

From the above, one can draw the con-clusion that the concentration of usage ona relatively small proportion of a library'scollection may be a function of a numberof underlying general processes. It is thehypothesis of this paper that, in academicresearch libraries, one of these processesis the formation of scholarly elites, whichis defined by three other bibliometriclaws. The first of these concerns the con-centration of author productivity, and itwas posited in a seminal paper written in1926 by Alfred J.Lotka, who analyzed thepublication rates of samples of chemistsand physicists. As a result of his analysis,he derived an inverse square law of scien-tific productivity by which the number ofpersons producing N papers is propor-tional to IN2. Lotka's Law describes ahighly stratified system of productivity: inhis chemist sample, 10.8 percent of the sci-entists made 54.5 percent of the contribu-tions; whereas in his physicist sample, 9.6percent of the scientists made 43.0 percentof the contributions.23 Such concentrateddistributions of productivity have beencommonly found in other studies, andAbraham Bookstein has speculated thatLotka's Law is invariant under the impactof society and time on patterns of scientificproductivity.24 For example, a highlyskewed distribution of. research produc-tivity was also discovered, in respect toscientific organizations in six socially het-erogeneous European countries, in a mas-sive UNESCO-sponsored study during

the 1970s.Moreover, one ofthe most im-portant findings of this study was that theresearch process appears to be responsiveto similar psychological, social, organiza-tional, and structural factors, whateverthe particular national setting in which ithappens to take place.25However, fromthe viewpoint of librarians, perhaps themost interesting analysis is the demon-stration by William Gray Potter that thedistributions of all author headings on theLibrary of Congress MARC computertapes and of author names in the Univer-sity of Illinois card catalog approximateLotka's Law.26

The next bibliometric law relates to thescattering of articles on a given subjectamong journals, and it was formulated bySamuel C. Bradford, who served as chieflibrarian from 1925 to 1938 atthe NationalScience Library in South Kensington, En-gland. In his work Bradford started fromthe principle that II every scientificsubjectis related, more orless remotely, to everyother scientific subject" and that therefore" the articles of interest to a specialist mustoccur not only in the periodicals specialis-ing on his subject, but also, from time totime, in other periodicals." He employedthis principle in an analysis of two specificsubjects, applied geophysics and lubrica-tion, and the results of this study led himto formulate his famous law for the scat-tering of articles by subject among jour-nals in the following manner:

If scientificjournals are arranged in order of de-creasing productivity of articleson a given sub-ject, they may be divided into a nucleus of peri-odicalsmore particularly devoted to the subjectand several groups or zones containing thesame number of articles as the nucleus, whenthe number of periodicals in the nucleus andsucceeding zones will be as 1:n:n2 . . .27

Bradford's Law results in a high concen-tration of articles on a subject in a smallcore of journals. Thus, in his appliedgeophysics sample, a mere 9.2 percent ofthe journals contained 51.7 percent of thearticles, with the remaining 48.3 percentof the articles scattered in decreasing pro-portions over the other 90.8 percent of thejournals; whereas in his lubrication sam-ple, the same 9.2 percent of the journalspublished 40.8 percent of the articles, with

Journal Collection 17

the remaining 59.2 percent of the articlesdispersed in decreasing proportions overthe other 90.8 percent of the journalS.28

Bradford's Law has been further devel-oped by Eugene Garfield, founder andcurrent president of the Institute for Sci-entific Information (ISI), a multinationalcorporation based in Philadelphia. Gar-field and his company have been innova-tors in the computerized citation indexingof journals, and they developed their prin-ciples and methodology in the natural sci-ences. ISI's first major product was theScienceCitationIndex(SCI),which beganpublication in 1963. Later ISIextended itsapplication of citation indexing to the so-cial sciences with the introduction of theSocial Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in 1973,and more recently, in 1978, brought outthe Arts & Humanities Citation Index(A&HCI).

With the insight provided by its data-bases, ISI has been able to investigate thestructure. of scholarly journal literatureand establish the coverage of its indexeson sound bibliometric principles. The firstexploratory investigation of the nature ofthese principles was conducted by ISI in1971, and it entailed the analysis of the ap-proximately one million references thatwere published during the last quarter of1969 in the 2,200 journals then covered bySCI. Due to this investigation, Garfieldconcluded that a good multidisciplinaryjournal collection need contain no morethan a few hundred of an estimated50,000-100,000 scientific and technical ti-tles to provide effective coverage of the lit-erature most used by scientists. For proofof this, he adduced the following data:only 25 journals were cited in 24 percent ofall references; only 152 journals, in 50 per-cent of all references; only 767 journals, in75 percent of all references; and onlyabout 2,000 journals, in 85 percent of allreferences. In this analysis, Garfield notedthat the predominance of cores was ubiq-uitous. The picture derived from the datacaused him to state his conclusion in thefollowing manner:

I can say that a combination of the literature ofindividual disciplines and specialties producesa multidisciplinary core for all of science com-prising no more than 1,000 journals. The essen-

18 College & Research Libraries

tial multidisciplinary core could, indeed, bemade up of as few as 500journals.29

These findings were confirmed by a sub-sequent analysis of SCI citations in 1974,and this latter study also revealed a re-markable stability in the citation rankingof the science journals in the upper stra-tum.3o

As a result of his research, Garfieldevolved a new bibliometric law, which henamed "the law of concentration." Thiswas derived from Bradford's Law on thesubject scattering of articles among jour-nals, which he reformulated by transpos-ing it from the level of a single discipline tothat of science as a whole. According toGarfield, there are as many different jour-nal cores as there are special fields in sci-ence, but there is also a considerableamount of overlap. He compares Brad-ford's Law to a comet with the journal nu-cleus representing the head and the suc-ceeding zones acting as the tail, whichbecomes wider in proportion to the dis-tance from the head. Employing this anal-ogy, Garfield defines his law of concentra-tion as stating that "the tail of theliterature of one discipline consists, inlarge part, of the cores of the literature ofother disciplines." In his view, this con-centration effect is so great that it is possi-ble to provide adequate coverage for allscience with a relatively small number ofjournals.31

PRINCIPLE OFCUMULATIVE ADV ANT AGE

The highly skewed distributions com-mon to all the above bibliometric laws ap-pear to be the result of a process of socialstratification based on the principle of cu-mulative advantage. Probably the mostsignificant analyses of the social mecha-nisms underlying this process of stratifica-tion have been conducted by a group ofsociologists centered around Robert K.Merton-a group that includes HarrietZuckerman, Jonathan Cole, and StephenCole. In a landmark paper on the psycho-social influences affecting the allocation ofrewards to scientists, Merton posited theconcept of "the Matthew effect," whosename he took from the Gospel according

January 1985j

, to St. Matthew: "For unto every one thathath shall be given, and he shall haveabundance: but from him that hath notshall be taken away even that which hehath." Putting the matter in less statelylanguage, Merton wrote that "the Mat-thew effect consists in the accruing ofgreater increments of recognition for par-ticular scientific contributions to scientistsof considerable repute and the withhold-ing of such recognition from scientistswho have not yet made their mark. ,,32

Merton's concept of the Matthew Effecthas been developed into a comprehensivetheory for the stratification of science byZuckerman and the Coles. In her study ofAmerican Nobelists, Zuckerman arguedthat the normatIve values of the scientificsystem, with its emphasis on certifiedknowledge and universalistic criteria, leadto extreme elite formation by consistentlyrewarding those persons with the mostability, and she found a pattern of cumula-tive advantage in the careers of the Nobel-ists, who generally did their graduatework under members of the scientific eliteat the best institutions and thereby in-creased their opportunities to publish andacquire further resources.33 For their part,in work focused primarily on a<;ademicphysicists, the Coles disputed the com-monly held assumption that progress inscientific research depends upon largenumbers of average scientists makingsmall discoveries. On the contrary, ac-cording to their view, the advance of sci-ence is really the product of small, interac-tive elites, and even the so-called smallerdiscoveries result principally from the ef-forts of the top strata of the scientific com-munity. In dealing with the social causesfor the extreme stratification of science,the Coles also decided in favor of the influ-ence of universalistic criteria, meritocracy,and cumulative advantage, whereby per-sons doing well at "time one" have abet-ter probability of doing well at "timetwo," independently of their objectiveroleperformance.34

The same mechanism of cumulative ad-vantage, postulated by Merton, Zucker-man, and the Coles as underlying the so-cial stratification of science, also seems tobe operative in the bibliometric laws. This

.~,

supposition lay behind the attempt by De-rek}. de SollaPrice, in a seminal paper, tobase the bibliometric and other social lawson a unifying probabilistic theory, whichhe called the "cumulative advantage dis-tribution" after the pioneering work ofMerton and the Coles. Price introducedthis theory in the following manner:

It is common in bibliometric matters and inmany diverse social phenomena, that successseems to breed success. A paper which hasbeen cited many times is more likelyto be citedagain than one which has been little cited. Anauthor of many papers is more likelyto publishagain than one who has been less prolific. Ajournal which has been frequently consultedfor some purpose is more likelyto be turned toagain than one of previously infrequent use.Words become common or remain rare. A mil-lionaire gets extraincome faster and easier thana beggar.35

Price then proceeded to construct a statis-tical model in which success increases thechance of further success, but failure, as a"nonevent," has no subsequent effect onchanging the probabilities. He likened it toa single-edged Matthew Effect, since thesecond part of the verse-"'. . . from himthat hath not shall be taken away even thatwhich he hath"-did not occur. As Pricelater explained, "My model is for lifetimescores of a series of games played tourna-ment style, gradually reducing the largefield of players to a small elite of highlysuccessful champions.,,36

Price's theories have been corroboratedby the work and observations of others.For example, Zuckerman found that incomparison with a matched sample of dif-ferent scientists, the Nobelists began topublish earlier in their careers and had alifetime average of published papersabout 2.2 times higher than the matchedsample. Moreover, even the earliest workpublished by future Nobelists, while stillin their twenties, had an unusually highand long citation record, and this was par-ticularly true of their papers reportingtheir prizewinning research.37 Zucker-man's findings in respect to the Nobelistswere substantiated by Paul D. Allison andJohn A. Stewart, who concluded after ananalysis of the publication and citation',rates of samples of biologists, chemists,.

l

~\ ,~

Journal Collection 19

mathematicians, and physicists, that thehighly skewed distributions of productiv-ity among scientists could be partly ex-plained by a process of cumulative advan-tage and that, because of feedbackthrough recognition and resources, highlyproductive scientists maintained or in-creased their productivity, while scientistswho produced very little produced evenless later, thereby increasing the inequal-ityin productivity, resources, and esteem,as a cohort of scientists aged.38

Perhaps some of the most interestingwork on the principle of cumulative ad-vantage in bibliometrics has been done byBertram C. Brookes on the social bases ofBradford's Law. In one of his earlier pa-pers, Brookes hypothesized that the Brad-ford distribution could be expected toarise "when selection is made of items,characterized by some common element,which are all equally open to selection foran equal period and subject to the,success-breeds-success' mechanism, butwhen the selection of a most populargroup is also, but to a weaker extent, sub-ject to restriction.,,39 Later he came to theconclusion that Bradford's Law could beregarded as a particular example of an em-pirical law of social behavior and thatsome variant of the Bradford distributionwill result whenever members of a social

group are engaged in the same activi~ un-der the conditions of competition. Aspart of his investigations, Brookes demon-strated the existence of a powerful Mat-thew Effect while testing Bradford's Lawwith a sample of musicological data on thenumbers of phonograph records devotedsolely to the works of one composer andissued during the five-year period1972-76.41

There is also evidence that the principleof cumulative advantage is operative inthe usage of library materials. In a pioneerstudy done at the University of Chicagoand first published in 1961, Herman H.FussIer and Julian L. Simon examined theuse patterns of books in economics, Teu-tonic languages and literatures, and otherdisciplines. The variables analyzed in thisstudy were the past circulation of thebooks and objective demographic charac-teristics such as language, publication

20 College & Research Libraries

date, and date of accession by the library.As a result of their analysis, FussIer andSimon concluded that past use is an excel-lent, and by far the best, predictor of fu-ture use. Moreover, the study alsoshowed that statistical indexes derivedfrom recorded use agree with the consen-sus of a group of scholars about the valueof books in their own field at least as wellas a single scholar's judgment wouldagree with that consensus. When the Uni-versity of Chicago results were investi-gated at Northwestern, Yale, and Berke-ley, it was revealed that there is aconsiderable similarity in the reading in-terests of scholars at different institutionsand that, for titles held in common, pre-dictions about future use at one institutionwould be. quite accurate in predicting fu-ture use of the same books at other institu-tions.42 Although FussIer and Simon dis-covered no signs that the use of books is"contagious" -Le., that the use ofa bookin one year substantially raises the proba-bility that it will be used in the next year-Stephen Bulick, one of the participants inthe University of Pittsburgh study, foundthat monograph circulation at the HillmanLibrary conformed to one variant of Brad-ford's Law and speculated, on the basis ofBrookes' early work, that this was a conse-quence of a cumulative advantage pro-cess.43 If this speculation is correct, thenthere may be a double-edged Matthew Ef-fect in operation, since the University ofPittsburgh study revealed that, upon pur-chase, any given book at the Hillman li-brary had only a slightly better than onechance in two of ever being borrowed; af-ter two years of not circulating, onechance in four; and after six years of notcirculating, one chance in fifty.44

USE OF CITATION INDEXESIN ACADEMIC EVALUATION

Thus, both the social stratification ofscholarly activity and the concentration oflibrary usage appear to operate on thesame principles, and whether the latter isa reflection of the former may be clarifiedby the role that citation analysis and-more particularly-the citation indexespublished by ISI have come to play in aca-demic evaluation and library collection de-velopment. The traditional method of aca-

January ~985

demic evaluation is peer review. Peerreview is also the basis for the six majorstudies that have been done since 1924 onthe quality of American graduate depart-ments by: Raymond M. Hughes, 1924 and1934;45 Hayward Keniston, 1957;46AllanM. Cartter, 1964;47and Kenneth D. Rooseand Charles J. Andersen, 1969.48The mostrecent, An Assessment of Research-DoctoratePrograms in the United States (hereaftercalled the Assessment), was done in 1981under the sponsorship of the AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies, AmericanCouncil on Education, National ResearchCouncil, and Social Science ResearchCouncil.49

In these studies the methodology essen-tially was to construct an index of qualityfrom the ratings provided by a survey of anational sample of faculty members se-lected from each field under consider-ation. However, in response to criticismsof this methodology, the Assessment alsoprovided departmental ratings by no lessthan sixteen measures which-besides re-putational survey results-were groupedunder the following headings: programsize, characteristics of graduates, univer-sity library size, research support, andpublication records. One of the lIlore note-worthy attributes of these reputationalrankings has been their relative stabilityover time. For example, when a peer rat-ing of academic departments in chemis-try, history, and psychology was con-ducted by Rodney T. Hartnett, Mary JoClark, and Leonard L. Baird in 1975 for theCouncil of Graduate Schools and Educa-tional Testing Service as part of a pilotstudy for the Assessment, it was found thatthe rank correlations between the resultsof this study and the 1964 Cartter surveywere .98forchemis~, .98 for history, and ,.95 for psychology. 50 These findings werecorroborated when the correlation coeffi-cients of the reputational survey resultsbetween the 1969 Roose-Andersen studyand the 1981Assessment ranged from. 79 to.96 for eleven fields in the mathematical,physical, social, and behavioral sciences.51Moreover, despite the extreme changes ingraduate education from 1924 to 1981, thesame seven universities-University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, University of Chi-cago, Harvard, University of Michigan,

Princeton, University of Wisconsin atMadison, and Yale-have consistently ap-peared in the top ten of the rankings everytime the departmental data of the abovereputational surveys have been aggre-gated into institutional scores.52 A clue tothe stability of these reputational rankingsmay have been given by a recent study,which revealed that the distribution ofpeer nominations is also highly skewedand that a law of cumulative advantageprovides the best theoretical approxima-tion for the distribution of such nomina-tions, especially when the overall pool ofdata is broken down into well-definedspecialties.53

On the whole, research has shown thatthe citation indexes published by ISI pro-vide a better measure of the quality ofscholarly contributions than sheer quan-tity of publications. This was the conclu-sion reached by Lyle V. Jones, one of theeditors of the Assessment, after reviewingthe literature on the subject.54 For exam-ple, in a pioneering analysis of 125 depart-ments in four scientific fields, Warren O.Hagstrom compared both the mean num-ber of research articles published by thefaculty in the period 1961-66 and the meannumber of citations to their works in the1966 SCIto the 1964 Cartter ratings and re-ported that citations to published worksare a better predictor of departmentalprestige than is quantity of published arti-cles.55Moreover, in their work on the so-cial stratification of science, Jonathan R.Cole and Stephen Cole found that straightcitation counts from the SCI are highly cor-related with virtually every refined mea-sure of quality, and upon analyzing thereferences made to a sample of 385 au-thors by eighty-four university physicistsin their papers that were most often citedin the 1965 SCI, they discovered that 60percent of the references were to scientistsat the nine most distinguished depart-ments, as ranked by the Cartter study,and that merely 7 percent of the referenceswere to scientists at the less prestigiousdepartments. 56

However, perhaps the most importantwork in recent years on the applica:tionofIS!'s citation indexes in academic evalua-tion has been done at the research insti-tute Computer Horizons, Inc. (CHI),

Journal Collection 21

which has utilized SCI citation data to de-

velop an "influence methodology."Thebasis of the CHI influence methodology is"citation influence per article," wherebythe influence of a journal is determinedfrom the weighted number of times an av-erage article in that journal is cited, withreferences from frequently cited journalscounting more heavily. When this mea-sure was tested against scientists' subjec-tive assessment of the average influenceper article for fifty-eight journals in ten sci-entific fields by surveying faculty at 97American universities, correlations in the.70-.90 range were found for seven of theten fields, indicating a strongpositiverela-tionship between peer assessment of jour-nal influence and the citation influenceratings. 57

In a major study of the quality of Ameri-can universities, CHI employed its influ-ence methodology to compare three bib-liometric measures against the 1969Roose~Andersen peer ratings of graduatedepartments. The bibliometric measureswere based on 127,000 university papersin ten scientific fields from 450 journalscovered by the SCI during the period1965-73, and they comprised the follow-ing: (1) the total number of a university'spapers in a given field as a measure of bib-liometric size; (2) the average citapon in-fluence per paper of a university in a fieldas a size-independent measure of bib-liometric quality; and (3) the total influ-ence of a university's papers in a field,which was found by multiplying the totalnumber of papers by the average citationinfluence per paper. Analysis of the datarevealed that these three bibliometricmeasures were all positively and highlycorrelated with the Roose-Andersen rank-ings, with total influence yielding thehighest correlations, followed closely bycorrelations with total number of papers,and then much less closely by average ci-tation influence per paper. Subsequentpartial correlation and regression tests in-dicated that the Roose-Andersen ratingshad two additive components: bibliome-tric size and bibliometric quality. The CHIstudy also found evidence that the Roose-Andersen evaluations were affected bythe overall prestige of the respective uni-versities. As proof of this, it was shown

22 College &:Research Libraries

that the ratings ot departments within auniversity were not independent, butwere associated with the total bibliometricsize of the uJ;liversity, and that universityrankings in different fields were muchmore highly correlated when based onpeer assessment than when based onbibliometric measures. 58

CHI's work has been corroborated byothers. ThUS, Michael D. Gordon found astrong association between sociologists'evaluations of journal ranks and SSCI cita-tion rank indicators.59 David E. Drew andRonald Karpf discovered a correlation of.91 between the 1964 Cartter ratings anddepartmental publication rates in highlycited mathematics journals during1960-63.60Michael E. D. Koenig reportedin a study of the pharmaceutical industrythat expert judgment is very highly correl-ated with measures of publication activityand appears to be an additive function ofpublication size and publication (citation)quality, with the principal component be-ing size.61 In their analysis of more thanthirty university measures, includingpublication rate in journals covered by the151indexes, faculty size, university reve-nue, volumes in the library, number ofstudents, and the Roose-Andersen rat-ings, J. Philippe Rushton and SariJ. Melt-zer found that those universities that werehigh on one measure were also high onthe others. They came to the conclusionthat all these disparate measures werepermeated by one general factor thatcould be labeled a dimension of wealth,quality, or size.62

Substantial support for the citation in-dexes produced by 151as tools in academicevaluation came when the Assessmentused them to measure the publication rec-ords of the programs under consideration.For example, in the six fields evaluated inthe mathematical and physical sciences-chemistry, computer science, geoscience,mathematics, physics, and statistics/biostatistics-two publication measure-ments were employed: (1) the total num-ber of published articles attributable to theprograrnfrom the 1978-79 SCI; and (2) theestimated "overall influence"-Le., the

.total influence measure developed byCHI- of the published articles attribut-edto the program in 1978-79. Strong correla-

January 1985

tions ranging from .70 to .85 were foundbetween the first measure and the meanreputational survey ratings of the schol-arly quality of the program faculty, andsubstitution of the measure for the" over-all influence" of the published articlesraised the correlations with the reputa-tional ratings of the scholarly quality of theprogram faculty in five fields to a rangerunning from .77 to .86. Only in statistics!biostatistics did substitution of thepublication-influence measure lower thecorrelation with the reputational rating ofthe faculty from .70 to .67.63On the otherhand, for the seven fields evaluated in thesocial and behavioral sciences-anthropology, economics, geography,history, political science, psychology, andsociology-the key publication measure-ment used in the Assessment was the num-ber of published articles attributed to theprogram faculty members from the1978-80 SSCI. Here, too, strong correla-tions ranging from .71 to .80 were foundbetween this measure and the mean repu-tational survey ratings of the scholarlyquality of the program faculty. 64

The Assessment noted the desirability ofcomplementing its publication measureswith citation counts, and a unique oppor-tunity to do so was provided by the ap-pearance of an article by Paul Davis andGustav F. Papanek, who ranked 122 eco-nomics departments by averaging the to-tal number of citations received by theirfaculty in the SSCI for the two years 1978and 1981.65When a matched sample ofeighty-eight economics departments wasdrawn from those covered by both the As-sessment and the Davis and Papanek arti-cle, it was discovered that the top eleven,or 12.5 percent, of these eighty-eight de-partments accounted for 53.3 percent ofthe total citations received by the entiresample; and of the top eleven depart-ments, seven were located at those sameseven universities that had consistentlyappeared among the top ten universities'in the reputational rankings since 1924.Moreover, there proved to be an ex-tremely strong correlation of .92 betweenthe mean reputational ratings reported inthe Assessment for the scholarly quality ofthe faculty in these eighty-eight depart-ments and their total citation rate after a

1!

square-root transformation had been per-formed on the latter to straighten the cur-vilinear relationship. 66 As a result of thesefindings, citations and peer ratings appearto be virtually the same measurement,and the concentration of citations on givendepartments may well be just as much afunction of the overall prestige of their re-spective universities as high ratings inpeer evaluations.

USE OF CITATION INDEXESIN COLLECTION MANAGEMENT

Although ISI's citation indexes havenow become accepted standards in aca-demic evaluation, their role in library col-lection development is still open to dis-pute. The primary objections to the use ofthese indexes in library acquisitions andstock management have been made by agroup of persons centered aroundMaurice B. Line, the director general ofBLLD. In the midseventies' a member ofLine's staff, Pauline A. Scales, analyzedthe relationship between citation fre-quency and library usage. To do so, sheemployed the Spearman rank correlationcoefficient to compare two lists. The firstlist ranked journals according to their fre-quency of use, as revealed by a 1969 sur-vey of interlibrary loan requests to the Na-tional Lending Library for Science andTechnology (NLLST, one of the predeces-sors of BLLD), whereas thesecond rankedjournals by their total number of citationsin the 1969 SCl. In the list for frequency ofuse, 1,571 titles appeared, and in the onefor frequency of citation, there were 880.Scales found startlingly low correlationsbetween the two lists, and the lower thejournals appeared on the lists, the poorerthe correlations. More than 250 journalshad to be considered before even 50 per-cent occurred in both lists.67

It was the above study and others thatcaused Line to question the relevance of

. citation analyses for practical librarian-ship,68 and he has succinctly defined hisposition in the following manner:

No-one questions that there is a positive, andsignificant, correlation between library usageand citations; the question is whether it is highenough to be useful. Correlations of 0.4 orwhatever are surely nothigh eno~gh.69

Journal Collection 23

Nevertheless, different analyses havesuggested that this opinion may not be en-tirely valid. In a review of the literature onthe application of citation analysis to li-brary collection development, Robert N.Broadus concluded that, although the evi-dence was inconsistent, there seemed tobe parallels between the use of materialsas indicated by citation patterns and asshown by studies of requests in libraries,especially in relation to the needs of peo-ple engaged in research.7OThis conclusionhas been supported by Elizabeth Pan,who utilized the Spearman rank correla-tion coefficient and chi-square tests tocompare journals ranked by total cita-tions, according to the SCl, with their fre-quency of use at six major biomedicalli-braries in the United States. Her resultsshowed a significant correlation of .47 be-tween the rankings of the journals by theirtotal citation and use counts, and in 72.0percent of the test journals, high citationindicated high use, while low citation in-dicated low use. 7!

Then, too, there is the extremely inter-esting work that has been done by BarbaraA. Rice and Tony Stankus on the usage ofscience journals at the State University ofNew York at Albany (SUNY A) for twoconsecutive semesters beginning in fall1976. As in any library, SU1\rYA usage washighly concentrated on a few journals,and from a total of 2,300 titles, only 1,221,or 53.1 percent, manifested any use dur-ing the two semesters. Moreover, of thesetitles, only 95-representing 7.8 percent ofthe titles actually used and a mere 4.1 per-cent of the total number of titIes-accounted for 50.0 percent of the usage.\Vhen sumA journal usage was testedagainst SCl citation frequency on a globalbasis, Le., for science as a whole withoutregard to separate disciplines, no signifi-cant correlations were found. However,as soon as the journals were segregatedaccording to subject specialty, scope, Rur-pose, and language, excellent and goodcorrelations emerged between SUNYAusage and SCl citation rates.72

The above research has been corrobo-rated by studies at the Troy H. MiddletonLibrary at Louisiana State University(LSU) in Baton Rouge. In a 1977 analysis ofjournal usage in the sciences at this li-

24 College & Research Libraries

brary, it was estimated that 93.0 percent ofthe total circulation was concentrated on9.7 percent of the titles. Of the 1,435 titlesthat had been charged out on a manualbasis-the analysis excluded those jour-nals circulated through the automatedsystem-the top 65, or 4.5 percent, ac-counted for 34.0 percent of the total usagegenerated by this sample. Of these 65, theSCI indexed 57, or 87.7 percent, althoughhere, again, the correlation between usageand citation frequency was low, since theanalysis was conducted on a global subjectbasis.73 This study was essentially re-peated in the social sciences during 1979,and it was found that of the 1,065 titlesthat had circulated on a manual basis, 200,or 18.8 percent, had accounted for 60.9percent of the sample's usage. Of these200 titles, 8 were mainly of Louisiana in-terest, and with the exclusion of the latterfrom the calculations, it was discoveredthat the ISI citation indexes covered 151,or 78.6 percent, of the high-use social sci-ence journals at Middleton Library. More-over, a survey of the faculty in three LSDsocial science departments-economics,psychology, and sociology-disclosed aremarkable correspondence between thejournal coverage in IS!' s citation indexesand those titles that the professorsthought should be on subscription atMiddleton Library.74

On account of these findings, it is appar-ent that citation frequency, as revealed byISI indexes, is measuring a process that isplaying an important role in the concen-tration of journal usage in academic li-braries. This should not be surprising, dueto the very nature of this measurement. Inessence, citations are virtually equivalentto peer ratings by research scholars of thesignificance of the work of other researchscholars, and given the operation ofLotka's Law, there is a high probabilitythat only a small percentage of these re-search scholars produce most of the cita-tions. As such, citations represent a mea-sure of scholarly elite formation, thehighly stratified and relatively stable so-cial system of scholarship, as well as ofthose journals that research scholars re-gard as important. However, academic li-braries usually serve a broader commu-nity than just the research scholars, a

January 1985j

community that:includes a large body ofundergraduates .who are not fully social-ized into the stratification system of schol-arship and who have needs and interestsof their own. Moreover, journals are pub-lished and read for purposes other thanresearch, such as news, current informa-tion, and entertainment, and even ISI haswarned that there are highly useful jour-nals that are not frequently cited.75 Forthese reasons, the pattern of library usageshould be regarded as a function of a num-ber of complex social variables, of whichISI citation frequency is measuring onlyone, Le., the collective judgment of thecommunity, or rather, communities of re-search scholars. Linda C. Smith was cor-rect when she wrote in her review of theliterature on citation analysis:

Citations are indicators of [library] use, butthere is probably a need for multiple indicators,as demand does not strictly parallel citation.Many materials are borrowed and read but notcited; authors who cite are only a subset of thetotal reading public. Other measures of usesuch as in-house use, circulation and interli-brary loan can be used to supplement citationanalysis in developing a more comprehensiveview of user needs as a basis for collectionde-velopment.76

Nevertheless, ISI citation frequency ismeasuring an extremely powerfufvariablein academic library use, and in times ofbudgetary stringency, when prioritiesmust be set, it is undoubtedly one of themost important measures that can be uti-lized by those persons charged with de-veloping and managing the journal collec-tions of research libraries.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

From this, a number of practical conclu-sions can be drawn. First of all, in manag-ing their journal collections, academic li-braries should not aim at com-

prehensiveness in their holdings butshould instead focus their efforts on de-veloping and maintaining a relativelysmall, multidisciplinary core of heavilyused titles that rank high in the informa-tion and social system of scholarship. Thecenterpiece of these efforts should be theISI citation indexes. Along with the an-nual accumulations of the SCI and SSCI,ISI publishes a volume entitled JournalCi-

or-I!

tationReports (fCR). In these JCRs the in-dexed journals are sorted into subjectgroups and ranked by various measures,of which two are the most important: (1)the total number of times a journal hasbeen cited in a given year; and (2) the" im-pact factor," which shows the average ci-tation rate per published item in a journalby dividing the number of times the jour-nal has been cited by the number of itemsit has published. (ISI is planning to pro-duce a fCR for the A&HCI in the near fu-ture.)77 The fCR are invaluable tools forevaluating library journal collections, andranked lists of titles derived from them canbe distributed to the faculty to determinewhether any gaps in the holdings shouldbe filled.

Several other factors should be takeninto consideration when decidingwhether to subscribe to a given journal,including: (1) extent of coverage by otherkey imtexes; (2) size of circulation; (3)number of years in existence; (4) facultyevaluations of quality and need; (5) repu-tation of the editorial board and authors;and (6) reputation of the publisher, whichincludes the ranking of the university if auniversity press is the publisher andwhether the journal is an organ of a majorassociation. Information from the refer-ence and serials departments on the re-quirements of the library's patrons shouldalso be taken into account, and careshould be exercised with foreign-language journals, which tend to be little-used outside of certain fields in historyand the humanities. In all of this, aca-demic libraries should not try to profiletheir journal collections too closely by sub-ject. Although subject matter is probablythe most powerful determinant of use, it isnot always possible to predict accurately,by this variable alone, whether a journalwill be used, given the interdisciplinarynature of scholarship and the operation ofGarfield's law on concentration.

However, the main conclusion to be de-rived from this paper is that academic li-braries should establish systems for con-stantly monitoring both their external andinternal journal usage in order to take ad-vantage of the Matthew Effect. If a journalis being continually requested through in-terlibrary loan, it shquld be placed on sub-

Journal Collection 25

scription regardless of the number ofother libraries holding it. As a matter offact, in accordance with the principle ofcumulative advantage, the larger thenumber of other libraries holding a jour-nal, the more necessary it is for a given li-brary to acquire it. One consequence ofthe Matthew Effect should be a relativelyhigh degree of systemic stability overtime, or at least as much stability as it ispossible to expect in a complex and dy-namic social phenomenon such as journalusage. Indeed, if such stability does notexist, then there is no basis for the rationalmanagement of library journal collections.

It has been shown that the rankings ofacademic departments and universitieshave been comparatively stable over time,and that citation patterns manifest an ex-traordinary degree of stability. Thus, AlanSingleton found that, when ranked by ci-tation count, three of the top five physicsjournals in 1899 were still among the toptwenty in 1974,78whereas Maurice B. Linediscovered a 95 percent overlap amongthe one hundred journals most often citedin the SCI in 1979 and 1982, respectively,as well as a 78 percent overlap in the twohundred journals most often cited in theSSCI between 1977 and 1982.79The stabil-ity in citation patterns should be regardedpartly as a reflection of the stability of thesocial system of scholarship as a whole,and since the concentration of journal us-age appears to be a function ot the stratifi-cation of this system and based upon thesame process of cumulative advantage, itshould be possible to expect a similar sta-bility in library usage, although to a lesserextent due to the operation of other vari-ables.

This problem has been studied at BLLD:when lists of serials in rank order of de-mand were produced from the 1975 and1980 BLLD surveys, there turned out tobe, upon comparison, a52percentoverlapamong the top five thousand titles on eachlist.80At first glance, such a finding seemsto indicate that library usage is unstable,but in an article criticizing the methodol-ogy employed in the BLLD study, John A.Urquhart demonstrated that it was statis-tically possible to expect a maximum over-lap of only 64 percent.8! The BLLD studywas replicated to compare the rank lists of

26 College & Research Libraries

serials resulting from the usage surveysconducted in 1980 and 1983 at that library,and this time a 59 percent overlap ap-peared among the top five thousand titleson these two lists.82A further insight intothis problem has been provided by Bar-bara A. Rice in her analysis of the usage ofscience journals for two consecutive 'se-mesters at SUNYA. Rice found a consider-able consistency between the two semes-ters for those titles showing the heaviestuse, with a significant overall correlationof .66, and of the 276 journals that wereutilized during the second semester butnot the first, 145 were used only once.83

Thus, library usage appears to be fairlystable, partially as a consequence of therelative stability of the social system ofscholarship, and this brings into focus theclass of journals that was not used duringthe course of various studies. The "zero-use" class can amount to a large propor-tion of a library's journal collection. Forexample, the University of Pittsburghstudy of journal usage at six branch sci-ence and engineering libraries found thisclass to range from a low of 63.1 percent inthe physics library to a high of 93.2 percentin the engineering library;84 Rice discov-

January 1985

ered that 46.9 percent of the science jour-nals were not used for two consecutive se-mesters at SUNYA;85whereas at BLLD, itwas revealed that demand concentratedon an estimated 15 percent of the totalnumber of serials titles (current or ceased)in 1975, 14 percent in 1980, and 11percentin 1983.86As a result of this phenomenon,it should be possible to expect that if theusage of a library's serials collection wereconstantly monitored for a given numberof years-preferably by a methodologythat would capture in-house use, such assimply marking used volumes as they arereshelved87 -there would emerge a con-siderable class of journals that have a highprobability of never being used or at leastused so seldom that it would not be worthretaining them. Such journals would bevery likely on the downward edge of theMatthew Effect, and for them it would bebetter to rely on other libraries or a centralinterlibrary loan system. Moreover, theircancellation would open the way for ex-perimenting with new journals, acquiringmultiple copies of high-use journals, oreven for buying books. The problem re-quires further research.

REFERENCES

1. American Library Association and others, Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2d ed. (Chicago:American Library Assn., 1978), p.570.

2. Derek J. de Solla Price, Sciencesince Babylon, en!. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Pr., 1975),p.164-69.

3. Maurice B. Line and Stephen Roberts, "The Size, Growth and Composition of Social Science Lit-erature," International Social Science Journal 28:126-31 (1976).

4. Carolyn F. Ulrich, ed., Periodicals Directory: A Classified Guide to a SelectedList of Current Periodicals,

Foreign and Domestic (New York: Bowker, 1932), p.ix.5. Eileen C. Graves, ed., Ulrich's Periodicals Directory: A Classified Guide to a Selected List of Current

Periodicals, Foreign and Domestic, 10th ed. (New York: Bowker, 1963), p.ix.6. Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory: A Classified Guide to Current Periodicals, Foreign and Domes-

tic, 2 v., 23d ed. (New York: Bowker, 1984), p.ix.7. Irregular Serials & Annuals: An International Directory, 9th ed. (New York: Bowker, 1984), p.vii.8. Norman B. Brown, "Price Indexes for 1977: U.S. Periodicals and Serial Services," LibraryJournal

102:1462-67 (July 1977).9. Norman B. Brown and Jane Phillips, "Price Indexes for 1984: U.S. Periodicals and Serial Ser-

vices," LibraryJournal 109:1422-25 (Aug. 1984).10. Richard De Gennaro, "Escalating Journal Prices: Time to Fight Back," American Libraries 8:69-70

(Feb. 1977).11. Herbert S. White, "Strategies and Alternatives in Dealing with the Serials Management Budget, "

in SuI H. Lee, ed., Serials Collection Development: Choicesand Strategies (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian,1981), p.38; Kendon Stubbs, "University Libraries: Standards and Statistics," College & ResearchLibraries 42:527-38 (Nov. 1981).

Journal Collection 27

12. De Gennaro, "Escalating Journal Prices," p.70-72; White, "Strategies and Alternatives,"p.30-36; HerbertS. White, "Factors in the Decision by Individuals and Libraries to Place or CancelSubscriptions to Scholarly and Research Journals," LibraryQuarterly 50:300-308 (July 1980); DavidC. Taylor, Managing the Serials Explosion: The Issues for Publishers and Libraries(White Plains, N.Y.:Knowledge Industry Pub., 1982),p.19-21. '

13. National Center for Education Statistics, "Three Years of Change in College and University Li-braries," College& ResearchLibrariesNews 45:359-61 (July/Aug. 1984).

14. Alan Pritchard, "Statistical Bibliography or Bibliometrics?," Journalof Documentation25:348-49(Dec. 1969).

15. For a survey of the bibliometric laws, see Stephen J.Bensman, "Bibliometric Laws and LibraryUsage as SocialPhenomena," LibraryResearch4:279-312{Fall1982).

16. Abraham Bookstein, "Explanations of the Bibliometric Laws," Collection Management 3:151-62(Summer/Fall 1979).

17. Richard W. Trueswell, "Some Behavioral Patterns of Library Users: The 80/20 Rule," Wilson Li-brary Bulletin 43:458-61 (Jan. 1969); Richard W. Trueswell, "Growing Libraries: Who NeedsThem? A StatisticalBasisfor the No-Growth Collection," in Daniel Gore, ed., FarewelltoAlexan-dria: SolutionstoSpace,Growth,andPerformanceProblemsofLibraries(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,1976), p.72-104.

18. Allen Kent and others, UseofLibraryMaterials:TheUniversityofPittsburghStudy(New York: MarcelDekker, 1979), p.9-55; Bensman, "Bibliometric Laws," p.299-300; the University of Pittsburghanalysis of monograph usage was partially replicated at DePauw University, a small undergradu-ate institution, and a similar book-use pattern was found: Larry Hardesty, "Use of Library Materi-als at a SmallLiberalArts College," LibraryResearch3:261-82(Fall1981).

19. Kent and others, UseofLibraryMaterials,p.57-104 and 209-68; Roger R. Flynn, "The University ofPittsburgh Study of Journal Usage: A Summary Report," SerialsLibrarian4:25-33 (Fall1979).

20. C. A.,Bower, "Patterns of Use of the Serial Literature at the BLLD," BLL Review4:31-32 (Apr.1976); Maurice B. Line and D. N. Wood, "The Effect of a Large-Scale Photocopying Service onJournal Sales," Journalof Documentation31:238-42(Dec. 1975).

21. Ann Clarke, "The Use of Serials at the British Library Lending Division in 1980," Interlending Re-view9:111-12(Oct. 1981);Karen Merry and Trevor Palmer, "Use of Serials at the British LibraryLending Division in 1983," Interlending & Document Supply 12:56-57 (Apr. 1984).

22. Gordon Williams, "Interlibrary Loan Service in the United States," in Keith Barr and Maurice B.Line, eds., Essayson Information and Libraries: Festschrift for Donald Urquhart (London: CliveBingley, 1975), p.198-203.

23. Alfred J. Lotka, "The Frequency Distribution of Scientific Productivity," Journalof theWashingtonAcademyofSciences16:317-23 (June 19,1926); Bensman, "Bibliometric Laws," p.279-81.

24. Abraham Bookstein, "Patterns of Scientific Productivity and Social Change: A Discussion ofLotka's Law and BibliometricSymmetry," Journalof the American Societyfor Information Science28:206-10 (July 1977). .

25. Frank M. Andrews, ed., ScientificProductivity: TheEffectivenessof ResearchGroupsin Six Countries(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1979), p.9, 36.

26. William Gray Potter, "Lotka's Law Revisited," Library Trends 30:31-37 (Summer 1981).27. Samuel C. Bradford, Documentation (London: Crosby Lockwood, 1953), p.148-54.28. Bensman, "Bibliometric Laws," p.286-88.29. Eugene Garfield, "Citation Analysis as a Toolin Journal Evaluation," Science178:471-79(Nov. 3,

1972).30. Eugene Garfield, "Significant Journals of Science," Nature 264:609-15 (Dec. 16, 1976).31. Eugene Garfield, CitationIndexing:Its TheoryandApplicationin Science,Technology,andHumanities

(New York: John Wiley, 1979), p.21-23, 160.32. RobertK. Merton, "The Matthew Effectin Science," Science159:56-63(Jan. 5, 1968).33. Harriet Zuckerman, ScientificElite: NobelLaureatesin theUnitedStates(New York:FreePress, 1977),

p.59-60, 248.34. JonathanR. Cole and Stephen Cole, "The Ortega Hypothesis," Science178:368-75 (Oct. 27,1972);

Jonathan R. Cole and Stephen Cole, SocialStratificationin Science(Chicago:Univ. of Chicago Pr.,1973), p.119-20, 216-53.

35. Derek J. de Solla Price, "A General Theory of Bibliometric and Other Cumulative Advantage Pro-cesses," Journalof theAmericanSocietyfor InformationScience27:292(Sept./Oct. 1976).

36. DerekJ. de SollaPrice, "Cumulative Advantage Urn Games Explained:A Reply to Kantor," Jour-nal of theAmericanSocietyfor InformationScience29:204(July 1978).

37. Zuckerman, ScientificElite, p.37-41, 145-49, 184-89, 249, 302.38. Paul D. Allison and John A. Stewart, "Productivity Differences among Scientists: Evidence for

i~

28 College & Research Libraries January 1985

Accumulative Advantage," American SociologicalReview 39:596-606 (Aug. 1974).39. Bertram C. Brookes, "Bradford's Law and the Bibliography of Science," Nature 224:954 (Dec. 6,

1969).40. Bertram C. Brookes, "Theory of the Bradford Law," Journal of Documentation 33:180-209 (Sept.

1977); Bertram C. Brookes, "The Bradford Law: A New Calculus for the Social Sciences?," Journalof the American Society for Information Science 30:233-34 (July 1979).

41. Bertram C. Brookes, "The Foundations of Information Science. Part II. Quantitative Aspects:Classes of Things and the Challenge of Human Individuality," Journal of Information Science2:213-21 (Nov. 1980).

42. Herman H. Fussier and Julian L. Simon, Patterns in theUseofBooksin LargeResearchLibraries (Chi-cago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1969), p.5-67, 141-47.

43. Stephen Bulick, "Book Use as a Bradford-Zipf Phenomenon," College& ResearchLibraries39:215-19 (May 1978).

44. Kent and others, Useof LibraryMaterials, p.lO.45. Raymond M. Hughes, "A Study of the Graduate Schools of America," Bulletin of theAssociationof

AmericanColleges11:237-45 (May 1925); David Allan Robertson, ed., American Universities and Col-leges (New York: Scribner, 1928), p.161-63; Raymond M. Hughes, "Report of the Committee onGraduate Instruction, EducationalRecord 15:192-234 (1934).

46. Hayward Keniston, Graduate Study and Research in the Arts and Sciencesat the University ofPennsylva-nia (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1959), p.115-50.

47. Allan M. Cartter, An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education (Washington, D.c.: AmericanCouncil on Education, 1966).

48. Kenneth D. Roose and Charles J. Andersen, A Rating of Graduate Programs (Washington, D.c.:American Council on Education, 1970).

49. Lyle V. Jones, Gardner Lindzey, and Porter E. Coggeshall, eds., An Assessment of Research-DoctorateProgramsin the United States,5v. (Washington, D.c.: National Academy Pr., 1982).Thefivevolumes have the followingsubtitles: BiologicalSciences;Engineering;Humanities;Mathematical& PhysicalSciences;and Social& BehavioralSciences.

50. RodneyT. Hartnett, MaryJo Clark, and Leonard L. Baird, "Reputational Ratings of Doctoral Pro-grams," Science199:1311-12 (Mar. 24, 1978).

51. Jones, Lindzey, and Coggeshall, An Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States:Mathematical & Physical Sciences,p.185-91 and Social & Behavioral Sciences,p.201-209.

52. Judith K. Lawrence and Kenneth C. Green, A Question of Quality: The Higher Education RatingsGame, AAHE-ERIC/Higher Education Research Report, no. 5 (Washington, D. C. : American Asso-ciation for Higher Education, 1980), p.8-9; David C. Webster, "America's Highest Ranket! Gradu-ate Schools, 1925-1982," Change 15:16-19 (May/June 1983).

53. M. Kochen, R. Crickman, and A. Blaivas, "Distribution of Scientific Experts as Recognized byPeer Consensus," Scientometrics 4:45-56 (Jan. 1982).

54. Lyle V. Jones, "The Assessment of Scholarship," in Edward H. Loveland, ed., Measuring theHard-to-Measure, New Directions for Program Evaluation, no. 6 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980),p.9.

55. Warren O. Hagstrom, "Inputs, Outputs, and the Prestige of University Science Departments,"Sociology of Education 44:375-84 (Fall 1971).

56. Cole and Cole, Social Stratification in Science, p.21-36, 219-25.57. Paul R. McAllister, Richard C. Anderson, and Francis Narin, "Comparison of Peer and Citation

Assessment of the Influence of Scientific Journals," Journal of the American Society for InformationScience31:147-52 (May 1980).

58. Richard C. Anderson, Francis Narin, and Paul McAllister, "Publication Ratings versus Peer Rat-ings of Universities," Journal of the American Society for Information Science29:91-103 (Mar. 1978).

59. Michael D. Gordon, "Citation Ranking versus Subjective Evaluation in the Determination of Jour-nal Hierarchies in the Social Sciem:es," Journal of the American Society for Information Science33:55-57 (Jan. 1982).

60. David E. Drew and Ronald Karpf, "Ranking Academic Departments: Empirical Findings and aTheoretical Perspective," Research in Higher Education 14:305-20 (1981).

61. Michael E. D. Koenig, "Determinants of Expert Judgement of Research Performance," Scientome-trics 4:361-78 (Sept. 1982); Michael E. D. Koenig, "Bibliometric Indications versus Expert Opinionin Assessing Research Performance," Journal of the American Society for Information Science34:136-45 (Mar. 1983).

62. J. Philippe Rushton and Sari J.Meltzer, "Research Productivity, University Revenue, and Schol-arly Impact (Citations) of 169 British, Canadian, and United States Universities (1977)," Scientome-trics 3:275-303 (July 1981).

Journal Collection 29

63. Jones, Lindzey, and Coggeshall, An Assessment of Research-DoctoratePrograms in the United States:Mathematical& Physical Sciences, p.27-29, 165-68, 220-37.

64. Jones, Lindzey, and Coggeshall, An Assessment ofResearch-DoctoratePrograms in the United States:Social & BehavioralSciences, p.27-29, 180-84.

65. Paul Davis and Gustav F. Papanek, "Faculty Ratings of Major Economics Departments by Cita-tions," American Economic Review 74:225-30 (Mar. 1984).

66. The statisticaL analysis of the. data from the above article and the Assessment was performed byMiriam R. Bensman as part of an ongoing bibliometric research project at the Troy H. MiddletonLibrary of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

67. Pauline A. Scales, "Citation Analyses as Indicators of the Use of Serials: A Comparison of RankedTitle Lists Produced by Citation Counting and from Use Data," Journal of Documentation 32:17-25(Mar. 1976). It is interesting to note that Scales also found a definite tendency for those journalsrequested less frequently from NLLST to be those held by the least number of libraries and viceversa.

68. Maurice B. Line, "On the Irrelevance of Citation Analyses to Practical Librarianship," in W. E.Batten, ed., EURIM II: A European Conferenceon the Application ofResearch in Information ServicesandLibraries, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 23-25 March 1976 (London: Aslib, 1977), p.51-56; Maurice B.Line, "Rank Lists Based on Citations and Library Uses as Indicators of Journal Usage in IndividualLibraries," CollectionManagement 2:313-16 (Winter 1978); Maurice B. Line and Alexander Sandi-son, "Practical Interpretation of Citation and Library Use Studies," College& ResearchLibraries36:393-96 (Sept. 1975).

69. Maurice B. Line and StephenJ. Bensman, "M. B. Line, Director General, Lending Division, theBritish Library, and Stephen J. Bensman, Social Science Bibliographer, Louisiana State Univer-sity, Correspond Regarding Dr. Bensman's Paper 'Bibliometric Laws and Library Usage as SocialPhenomena,' " Library & InformationScienceResearch5:239(Fall1983).

70. Robert N. Broadus, "The Applications of Citation Analyses to Library Collection Building," Ad-vances in Librarianship7:315-19 (1977).

71. ElizabethPan, "Journal Citation as a Predictor of Journal Usage in Libraries," CollectionManage-ment2:29-38(Spring 1978).

72. Barbara A. Rice, "Science Periodicals Use Study," SerialsLibrarian 4:35-47 (Fall 1979); TonyStankus and Barbara A. Rice, "Handle with Care: Use and Citation Data for Science Journal Man-agement," Collection Management 4:95-110 (Spring/Summer 1982); Barbara A. Rice, "Selectionand Evaluation of Chemistry Periodicals," Science& TechnologyLibraries4:43-59 (Fall1983).

73. JeffreyL. Salter, "Journal CirculationSurvey and Analysis," (BatonRouge, La., 1977),typewrit-ten.

74. Bensman, "Bibliometric Laws," p.305-307.75. SSCIJournalCitationReports:A BibliometricAnalysisofSocialScienceJournalsin theISI DataBase,v.6,

ed. Eugene Garfield, in SocialSciencesCitation Index, 6v., 1982annual (Philadelphia: Institute forScientific Information, 1983), p.7A-8A.

76. Linda C. Smith, "Citation Analysis," Library Trends30:98(Summer 1981).77. Eugene Garfield, "Is Information Retrieval in the Arts and Humanities Inherently Different from

That in Science? The Effect That ISI's Citation Index for the Arts and Humanities Is Expected toHave on Future Scholarship," Library Quarterly 50:55 (Jan. 1980).

78. Alan Singleton, "Journal Ranking and Selection: A Review in Physics," Journal of Documentation32:268-69 (Dee. 1976).

79. Maurice B. Line, "Changes in Rank Lists of Serials over Time: Interlending vs. Citation Data,"Interlending & Document Supply12:145-46 (Oct. 1984).

80. Clarke, "The Use of Serials," p.112-13.81. John A. Urquhart, "Has Poisson been Kicked to Death? A Rebuttal of th€ British Library Lending

Division's Views on the Inconsistency of Rank Lists of Serials," Interlending Review 10:97-100 (July1982).

82. Merry and Palmer, "Use of Serials," p.57-58.83. Rice, "Science Periodicals," p.39-41.84. Kent and others, Useof LibraryMaterials, p.67-69, 217-22; Flynn, "The University of Pittsburgh

Study," p.26.85. Rice, "Science Periodicals," p.39-41.86. Merry and Palmer, "Use of Serials," p.5787. For the dangers of relying upon circulation data alone, see Robert M. Hayes, "The Distribution of

Use of Library Materials: Analysis of Data from the University of Pittsburgh," Library Research3:215-60 (Fall1981).

"