Starting From Ground Zero: Establishing a Collection for a New Doctoral Program

Abstract

This article reports a librarian's collection development efforts to support her institution's first independent doctoral degree (Ed.D., Educational Leadership) via a citation analysis comparing information usage by education doctorate dissertation authors from six peer institutions nationally. This analysis is part of a long-term examination of library collection use among CaliforniaState University, Long Beach (CSULB) doctoral students. Key findings include the relative young age among the information resources in educational leadership, which resource formats were cited, what serial titles were cited the most, and where they are available electronically. The ultimate aim is the creation of an essential collection in the subject discipline.

Citation analysis for core journals in educational leadership

“…Monographs accounted for 35.7 per cent, and the remaining 24.3 per cent of the citations were to other non-serial materials such as conference proceedings, government documents and reports (Table I). This is consistent with other citation studies in the field of education done by Broadus (1953), Mochida (1976) and Griffin (2011). The mean age for all serials and non-serials was 10.8 years and 11.8 years, respectively.…”

“…There were 1,398 unique serials with 878 of them characterized as refereed or peer-reviewed. In this phase, as in Phase 1 (Griffin, 2011), however, the two heaviest weighted serials were not peer-reviewed, Educational Leadership (cited 136 times by 50 students) and Phi Delta Kappan (cited 102 times by 41 students). Of the peer-reviewed or refereed serials, Educational Researcher received the highest number of citations: 62 citations by 35 students.…”

“…Next, dissertations were randomly chosen from each of the institutions. The study's initial phase concentrated on a randomly chosen sample of 60 EdD dissertations, 10 from each institution, published in 2005, 2006and 2007(Griffin, 2011. The current phase spotlights 120 randomly selected EdD dissertations, 20 from each from the six institutions, published from 2005 to 2010, which showed different results from Griffin (2011).…”

Collection Evaluation in the Small Library

“…This is a bit trickier problem. While Griffin (2011;2016)Educational Leadership and Emerson (2014) detail how citation analysis of dissertations and theses in a field can identify what journals are actually being used by people working in it, citation analysis does have its criticisms, and it remains to be seen if this methodology will translate to an interdisciplinary field like Black Church Studies. It would be an expansive, detailed project, but may be worth doing unless a viable alternative methodology (or a credible list of core journals) is found.…”