A CITATION ANALYSIS OF MLIS DISSERTATIONS

Many academic libraries attempt to source their collections from all the publications available. However, librarians may fail in this attempt because of some economic factors that prevent them from building a comprehensive collection of materials. The increasing price of periodicals and books and the unchanged budget for inter-library loan have precluded librarians from providing their best reference service to users. This study makes a contribution in topping a list of core journals cited in Library and Information Science (LIS) dissertations. A core list is helpful for students to use as a guide when they carry out a literature review. The aim is to identify the characteristics of cited literature in Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) dissertations submitted to University of Malaya. This includes finding out the various type of information resources used in research projects as well as other main variables, such as: language distribution of cited documents, publication frequency, authorship patterns, country of publishing, subject areas, chronological distribution of total citation, core journal titles used in the field of LIS, etc.