What is citation analysis?
Citation analysis is the methodical investigation of how scholars make use of each others' work. It has also been expanded to the analysis of Web links and the social Web.
In library and information studies (LIS), it has long been a core research area in its own right, as well as an important tool for studying resources and their uses for the purposes of library collection development, evaluation and management. More recently, many academic libraries have started to develop and provide value-added information services providing citation analysis to respond, e.g., to the needs of university and research management to understand and improve the sometimes highly controversial university ranking or research evaluation processes. The map on this page was created from citation analysis and provides an overview of the specialty structure of information science and key authors to read in each specialty.
Citation analysis is applied and studied in a number of other fields outside of LIS, including sociology, history of science, business, management, and research policy. Applied to the study of web links, it also provides the foundations for effective information retrieval on which the success of Google's search engine rest.
Why should you take this course?
By taking this course, you will become knowledgeable and skilled in citation analysis, which will help you as an academic librarian
- to improve your standing in the digital networked environment by offering important value-added information services,
- to have a powerful tool at your disposal for collection development, evaluation and management,
- to better help individual academic library users by being a go-to person for citation analysis applications as well as citation data sources, and
- to engage in a major area of LIS research.
Skills you will develop from taking this course are highly sought after and transferable.
Who should take this course?
- LIS students who plan to become academic librarians;
- Graduate students and research assistants in other academic departments who plan to apply citation analysis in current or future research projects;
- Academic librarians.
- Anyone who is interested in how scholarship and science or Google type search engines "tick".
