Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Abstract
Aim: The citation analysis is one of the quality indicators of research publications. An attempt has been made in this study, to examine the impact of citations on the documents published in the Pakistan Library & Information Science Journal (PLISJ) from 2004 to 2020.
Research Methodology: A retrospective research method was applied on the bibliographic detail of documents published in PLISJ and indexed in Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) - EBSCO Host. The publication data of PLISJ consisted of 17 years from 2004 to 2020 was available on the website of EBSCO (http://web.b.ebscohost.com/). A total of 68 issues were published in this period but the record of 66 issues was available on the EBSCO website, the data of two missing issues was retained from the hard copies of the journal. The selected dataset was entered in the spreadsheet of the Micro-Soft Excel Sheet for analysis. The record of citations was taken from Google Scholar. Standard Error of Means (SEM) of total publications and citations was calculated by SPSS-22. The articles published in the English Language have been included for analysis. The editorials, book reviews, news items and Urdu Language documents have been excluded. The number of citations gained by each record has been retrieved from Google Scholar from 25th to 30th November 2020.
Results: A total of 361 (SEM 21.24±1.32) articles have been identified with an average annual growth rate of 4.04. These documents received the ratio of the citations with SEM 37.94±4.90 and almost half of the documents (49.30%) have been cited. Ten papers quantified the status of h-Index. A strong correlation (0.958349) is found between the authorship pattern and number of citations, as multi-authors papers received more citations as compared to a single author. Dr. Rubina Bhattia and Dr. Khalid Mahmood emerged as the leading authors with 39, 21 papers, respectively. The highest citation impact has been received the document contributed by Dr. Mirza Muhammad Naseer and Dr. Khalid Mahmood. The maximum h-index scale (n=7) is gained by Dr. Khalid Mahmood. A bulk of documents was written on the subject category of “Biographical studies” whereas the highest citation impact has gone to the documents on “Reference Services”.
Conclusion: The growing inclination of papers in PLISJ has been observed in the study. As the papers are getting older, the number of citations is also increasing. The authorship pattern has explicitly enhanced from single to multiple authors. Faculty should encourage scholars to submit quality research in national journals.