Government publications represented in the social sciences citation index: An exploratory study

Supermarket: Where Do Social Scientists Shop?

“…Hernon found that the "top priority of economists and sociologists [in using government publications] is to gather census and normative data," and that historians used government publications for historical data more, while political sciences use them equally for statistics and current events information (Hernon, 1979, p. 51). Other studies by Hernon and Shepherd (1983) and Hernon and Purcell (1982) corroborated Hernon's earlier findings.…”

“…The variability in the findings on use of government publications among social scientists can be accounted for by disciplinary differences in the choice of disciplines included in citation studies. Low percentages in general relate to the fact that statistical sources are often not cited in footnotes or reference lists (Hernon & Shepherd, 1983).…”

Measuring scholarly use of government information: An altmetrics analysis of federal statistics

“…Citation studies that have focused on government information, infrequent in themselves, have primarily focused on raw counts and percentages of citations to US government information over all citations. In one exception, Hernon and Shepherd (1983) did find that the majority of US government information, in social science citations, was issued by the Census Bureau, Congress, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for Health Statistics, and Office of the Federal Register. While they point out that social scientists do refer to government information for federal statistics, their study did not discern how many of the citations were to datasets.…”

“…Brill (1990) also conducted a citation analysis within international relations journals for 1964, 1974, and 1984, which indicated that 46% of all documents cited were from the US government. While detail is provided on the selection process for journals and disciplines in these citation studies (also see Hernon & Shepherd, 1983;Hogenboom, 2002), sufficient detail on how US government documents were identified in the citations is lacking.…”