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Master's and Doctoral Thesis Citations: Analysis and Trends of a Longitudinal Study

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This article reports the results of a longitudinal study of over 9100 citations from 629 master's and doctoral theses written between 1973 and 1992 at a large midwestern land-grant university. The results of this study suggest that graduate students writing theses favor current research regardless of disciplinary affiliation. The length of theses increased over time and the number of citations in thesis bibliographies varied by discipline. Implications of the results for collection development and scholarship as well as areas for future research are discussed.
Master's and Doctoral Thesis Citations: Analysis and
Trends of a Longitudinal Study
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Kushkowski_2003_MastersDoctoralCitations.pdf (445.31 KB)
Date
2003-01-01
Authors
Parsons, Kathy
Kushkowski, Jeffrey
Parsons, Kathy
Kushkowski, Jeffrey
Wiese, William
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Parsons, Kathy
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Kushkowski, Jeffrey
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Abstract
This article reports the results of a longitudinal study of over 9100 citations from 629 master’s
and doctoral theses written between 1973 and 1992 at a large mid-western landgrant university.
The results of this study suggest that graduate students writing theses favor current research
regardless of disciplinary affiliation. The length of theses increased over time and the number of
citations in thesis bibliographies varied by discipline. Implications of the results for collection
development and scholarship as well as areas for future research are discussed.
Description
<p>This is a post-print of an article from <em>portal: Libraries and the Academy</em>, 3, no. 3
(2003): 259–276, doi:</p>
URI
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/handle/20.500.12876/62366
... Available evidence did show that citation analyses have been in use as a collection development tool within the disciplines of engineering, linguistics, education, sciences and psychology (Williams & Fletcher, 2006;Georgas & Cullars, 2005;Haycock, 2004;LaBonte, 2005;Sylvia, 1998). Multi-disciplinary studies by Kushkowski, Parsons and Wiese (2003) and Smith (2003), On the other hand, researchers have discovered that Journals are one of the most commonly used research tools (Pancheshnikov, 2007;Rethlefsen, 2007;Williams & Fletcher, 2006). The implication is that citation analysis can be used to rank, evaluate and categorize journals based on their frequency of article citation. ...
... The result of this study is a confirmation of the previous studies carried out which found that journals were the most commonly cited type, with other type varying widely. (Kim 2002;Kushkowski et al. 2003;Crawley-Low, 2006 &Olatokun andMakinde, 2019). The argument is that through citations analysis of serials, librarians will be well informed in journal rankings which will hitherto be a practical help in selecting serials of maximum utility leading to effective management of serials and reduces wasteful expenses on irrelevant serials. ...
... The essence of this area of this study is built on the premise that understanding the extent to which library users rely on older materials can be useful in determining which materials can be moved to remote storage (Ackerson 2001). This outcome is therefore in tandem with that of Musser and Conkling (1996) and Kushkowski et al. (2003) who in their separate studies found that the majority of materials cited in research works were less than eight years old. This implies that with the ages of the materials used by researcher known it will be easier for the serials librarian to determine More than 100 years Unknown which materials should leave the shelve or stay and in selection, it will also guide as to knowing serials that are not in their collections but need to be acquired regardless of the age. ...
Article
Serials being important to students and researchers as they contain the most current and relevant information that can be used for academic and research purposes needs to be assessed periodically to determine if they are still relevant to the users. This study therefore examines the analysis of serials citations in graduate-students’ theses as a functional tool for effective management of serials in university libraries using theses submitted from 2013 to 2021 in Library and information Science of four government owned universities in eastern region of Nigeria as case in point. The study was meant to provide answers to three research questions which formed the guide while a descriptive survey design was applied with a population of 203 which stood as the total number of masters’ degree theses produced by the four universities within the period under study. The main instruments used in collecting data for this study were the researcher-designed checklists with which 8445 serials citations were collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics of mode, mean and range and data presented in tables, charts and graphs using frequencies and percentile. The outcome of the study revealed that journals with 76% citations were the most cited against conference proceedings/reports with 20% and the least cited being government publications with only .5% citations. It was further established that multi authorship is the most cited authorship pattern in the graduates’ theses whereas the average age of serials cited were within the age bracket of 0 - 18. The conclusion drawn is that with the most cited type(s) of serials, serials titles, ages of serials and preferred authorship pattern known through citations analysis of serials in research reports, the university librarian is better placed as to knowing which serials to select, acquire and how to have them organized for easy accessibility and retrieval by users as well as the amount of money to be earmarked for their acquisitions which invariably will bring about prudent management of the library budget in this period of shrinking budget for academic libraries.The study therefore recommended among other things that for effective application of serials citations analysis as a functional tool for effective serial management, staff of serials unit most partner documentation unit as to ensuring proper citations analysis of serials submitted to the library by every department as this can be used as a guide for the unit to identify the core serials for selections, acquisitions and also as a guide for total serials collections maintenance.
... The result of this study is also a confirmation of the previous studies carried out which found that journals were the most commonly cited type, with other type varying widely. (Rieb 1993;Kim 2002;Kushkowski et al. 2003) as well as that of Gooden (2001); Crawley-Low (2006) and Olatokun& Makinde (2019) This outcome also bears witness to the proclamation that scholarly journals are the principle medium for reporting research findings and used to assist in ongoing researches to identify topics for future researches (American Library Association, 2018). ...
... The essence of this area of this study is built on the premise that understanding the extent to which library users rely on older materials can be useful in determining which materials can be moved to remote storage (Ackerson 2001). This outcome is therefore in tandem with that of Musser and Conkling (1996) and Kushkowski et al. (2003) who in their separate studies found that the majority of materials cited in research works were less than eight years old. ...
Article
This study is a citation analysis of serials in postgraduate research reports of library and information science of public universities in Southeast Nigeria from 2013 to 2021. The study was guided by six research questions in line with the objectives of the study. The study employed a descriptive survey design with a sampled population of 296 derived through census method from four public universities offering library and information science. The principle instruments used in collecting data for this study were self-designed checklists. With the checklists, 12455 serials citations were analyzed using descriptive statistics of mode, mean and range and data presented in tables, charts and graphs using frequencies and percentile. The study found that the most cited serials types were journals with 76.5% citations followed by conference proceedings/reports with 20% and the least cited being government publication with only .5 citations . It was further discovered that serials used were either in print or electronic form. . The study also revealed that multi authorship is the most frequently cited author pattern in library graduates theses and dissertations, while annual serials citations range from 1034 to 2205. The study indicated that the average age of serials used was within the bracket of 0 – 20 years. The study recommended among other things that there should be documentation librarian in each university library whose duty should be to track down research reports, ensuring proper documentations and upward delivery to the university library circulation unit. This study could serve as a collection development tool that can be used as a model for the library to identify the primary sources for acquisitions and also as a guide for collection maintenance
... Various studies in the literature also support this conclusion (Kushkowski, Parsons & Wiese, 2003;Arıca 2014;Tayfun et al., 2018;Haydaroğlu, 2022). ...
Conference Paper
Digitalization, which changes the way of doing business in the tourism sector, is important in terms of being aware and not falling behind in transformation. The studies show that Turkey is interested in the tools used to change the functioning of the tourism sector. However, due to the difficulty of allocating financial resources to digitalization investments and the lack of necessary talent and human resources for digitalization, it is noteworthy that investments in technologies for web sites, mobile applications and business processes take precedence over technologies developing within the scope of digitalization in Turkey. The study aimed to examine the postgraduate dissertations, which cover digitalization and finance, completed in Turkey in the field of tourism between 2010-2022 and published in the Council of Higher Education database, within the framework of parameters such as “type of the dissertation”, “release year of the dissertation”, “university of the released dissertation”, “number of pages of the dissertation” and “subject of the dissertation”. Within the scope of this study, in which bibliometric analysis, one of the qualitative research methods, is used, 20 dissertations (18 master’s and 2 doctoral) were examined. The study was limited to the parameters mentioned above due to various limitations. Similar studies in the future can be expanded with parameters such as “department of released dissertation”, “title of the advisor”, “language of the dissertation” and “keywords of the dissertation”. It is thought that the results of the study will contribute to the literature and can be a reference for future studies. It is also thought that the contribution to the future related literature can be increased by adding articles, books/book chapters and conference papers in addition to postgraduate dissertations.
... At the third place, it provides an opportunity for a comparative study of contemporary MBA theses with previous MBA theses (Zachariassen & Arlbjørn, 2010). An MBA thesis is the "culmination of a rigorous formal educational process" (Kushkowski et al., 2003: 2), aimed at showing a new significant contribution to the body of knowledge and providing evidence of academic achievement (Kushkowski et al., 2003). In the literature, there are several studies focusing on reviewing research projects in various business research areas, such as e-commerce (Varadarajan, 2002), quality management (Jack et al., 2001;Zain et al., 2001), taxation (Hulse, 2002), management accounting (Kihn &Näsi, 2017 andRiccio et al., 1999), Management Information Systems (Carr et al., 1986), management (Chang & Hsieh, 1997), Tourism and hospitality (Alhammad, 2020) logistics and supply-chain management (Rajkumar et al., 2016;Nakhata et al., 2013;Stock, 1987 and1988;Stock and Luhrsen, 1993;Stock, 2001;Stock and Broadus, 2006). ...
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