Behavioral Citation Analysis: Toward Collection Enhancement for Users

Abstract

A pilot study was developed to determine use of the University of Texas at Austin General Libraries’ research collections in the fields of civil engineering and educational psychology and to investigate the research behavior of graduate students. First, the authors sampled bibliographic citations from dissertations completed during the years 1997 and 2002 in the above-named fields. Then, a survey was sent to the dissertation writers to gain insight into use and opinions of library services for their graduate research. Analysis of information provided by both collection-and user-centered data-gathering techniques serves to underscore the value of the merged evaluation methods.