Understanding Information Use in a Multidisciplinary Field: A Local Citation Analysis of Neuroscience Research

Abstract

Assessing the information needs of a multidisciplinary academic community presents challenges to librarians managing journal collections. This case study analyzed the literature used by the neuroscience community at the University of Maryland to determine the following about the publications they cited: their type, their discipline, and how recent they were relative to the citing publication. The authors searched the ISI Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index to identify the publishing, citing, and coauthoring patterns of both faculty and graduate students to inform library decisions about collecting journals and other types of literature.