A Meta-Analysis of Scholarly Journals in Library and Information Science Theses: A Case Study

Abstract

One major issue faced in many university libraries, is the bibliometric analysis of scholarly journals cited in research reports by students especially the postgraduates who are ardent users of these scholarly journals as they form bulk of their research sources because of the recency, authenticity and reliability of their information and this remains a veritable tool for effective management of scholarly journals especially in the area of selection, acquisitions and weeding. This therefore is a bibliometrics study of scholarly journals cited in postgraduate library and information Science theses/dissertations of selected federal government universities in Nigeria from 2015 to 2023. The study applied descriptive survey design with a sampled population of 296 which form the total number of accessible masters’ theses and doctorate dissertations submitted within the period under study. The researcher self-designed checklists validated by three experts from the department of measurement and elevations of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria were the major instrument used in obtaining data needed for the study. Data collected were analyzed using frequency and simple percentile while the results were presented in tables. The outcome of the study among others revealed that the most cited scholarly journal titles were within the zone one (1) constituting the core journals cited by postgraduate students of library and information science of the studied university using Bradford’s Law of scattering. The result also shows that academic journals cited were published mainly in the US, UK, India and South Africa. Based on the findings, it was recommended among other things that for effective application of bibliometric analysis as a functional tool for effective journal management, staff of serials unit most partner documentation unit as to ensuring proper bibliometric analysis of journals submitted to the library by every department as this can be used as a guide for the unit to identify the core journals for selections, acquisitions and also as a guide for total serials collections maintenance and that university librarians should expose staff of the serials units to series of in-house training on how to apply bibliometric analysis in evaluating scholarly journals and proper classifications of scholarly journals based on their bibliographic entries