Overlap Between Humanities Faculty Citations and Library Monograph Collections 2005-2009

The authors wished to evaluate whether their collection housed the resources that their humanities faculty needed (and actually used) for their research, with the hope of providing additional illumination about general resource use by humanities scholars. This study asks not whether anyone used what was already owned, but instead whether the library owned what was needed. The answer to this question might have implications for storage or weeding decisions, approval plans for collections, and interlibrary loan. A citation analysis of 28 monographs published by their institution’s humanities faculty between 2004 and 2009 was used to assess how many of their cited sources were owned, how they were acquired (approval or firm order), their average age, and interdisciplinary usage as evidenced by LC classification. Subject areas assessed were History, Philosophy, Classics, and English. Findings include that one quarter of sources cited were over 25 years old, and that over the last fifteen years, the approval plan has provided more than three quarters of the sources cited that were owned

Citation Analysis for Collection Development: A Comparative Study of Eight Humanities Fields

This study analyzes 9,131 citations from the 2002 volumes of journals in eight humanities fields: art, classics, history, linguistics, literature, music, philosophy, and religion. This study found that citation patterns varied widely among humanities disciplines. Due to these differences, it is important for librarians with humanities collection development responsibilities to consider each field separately when making collection development decisions. The authors investigated the language of sources cited in each field. Foreign language citations continue to be dominated by French and German. This study also confirms that, in most humanities disciplines, monographs remain the dominant format of cited sources, although some fields cited monographs less frequently than expected.</p

Global English in the Humanities? A Longitudinal Citation Study of Foreign-Language Use by Humanities Scholars

The authors counted 16,138 citations within 468 articles found in four journals from history, classics, linguistics, and philosophy in the years 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002 in order to identify trends in foreign-language citation behavior of humanities scholars over time. The number of foreign-language sources cited in the four subjects has not declined over time. Consistent levels of foreign-language citation from humanities scholars indicate a need for U.S. research libraries to continue to purchase foreign-language materials and to recruit catalogers and collection development specialists with foreign-language knowledge