dc.description.abstract | This article analyzes the bibliometric features (the number of pages, completion years, the fields of
subject, the number of citations, and their distribution by types of sources and years) of 100 theses and
dissertations completed at the Department of Librarianship of Hacettepe University between 1974 and
2002. Almost a quarter (24%) of all dissertations were on university libraries, followed by public libraries
(9%). Doctoral dissertations were, on average, twice as long as master’s theses and contained 2.5 times
more citations. Monographs received more citations (50%) than journal articles did (42%). Recently
completed theses and dissertations contained more citations to electronic publications. Fourteen (or 3.2%
of all) journal titles (including Tu¨rk Ku¨tu¨phanecilig˘i, College & Research Libraries, and Journal of the
American Society for Information Science) received almost half (48.9%) of all citations. Eighty percent of
journal titles were cited infrequently. No correlation was found between the frequency of citations of the
most frequently cited journals and their impact factors. Cited journal titles in master’s and doctoral theses
and dissertations overlapped significantly. Similarly, journal titles cited in dissertations also overlapped
significantly with those that were cited in the journal articles published in the professional literature. The
distribution of citations to foreign journal titles fit Bradford’s Law of Scattering. The mean half-life of all
cited sources was 9years. Sources cited in master’s dissertations were relatively more current. Single
authorship was the norm in cited resources. Coupled with in-library use data, findings of the present study
can be used to identify the core journal titles in librarianship as well as to evaluate the existing library
collections to decide which journal titles to keep, discard, or relegate to off-site storage areas.
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