Journals in the Core Collection

ABSTRACT

This overview of the core concept applied to journals defines the relevant terminology and cites specific examples of core lists. Ten approaches for determining core journals (subjective judgment, use, indexing coverage, overlapping library holdings, citation data, citation network/co-citation analysis, production of articles, Bradford's Law, faculty publication data, and multiple criteria methods) are reviewed and the practical applications of core journals lists are explained. Theoretical and practical problems associated with the core concept and core journal lists are discussed and a taxonomy for classifying core journal lists is outlined.     

Core lists of medical journals: a comparison.

Five core lists of medical journals are compared with respect to size, intended users, and content. Despite variations in scope and depth, there is significant agreement among the lists. A list of the seventy-two titles appearing on four or all of the five lists is appended. There is no clear relationship between frequency of inclusion in these core lists and citation frequency as reported in Journal Citation Reports.     

A Core Collection of Trade Journals for Manufacturing

Trade journals are an important source of current information in academic libraries which support a business curriculum as well as for commercial, industrial and large public libraries. In recent years, studies establishing core lists of business periodicals have included trade journals, but have not dealt primarily with them. This study identifies trade journals for manufacturing industries, an economic activity defined and classified using SIC codes in the Standard Industrial Classification Manual. For this study, industries whose value of shipment was ten billion dollars or more annually were selected. Next, directories such as Business Publication Rates and Data which describe a journal's focus and coverage were consulted. From this large pool, the trade journal which most closely matched the industry defined by the SIC code was selected, provided it was indexed. If two or more trade journals were considered appropriate for the same industry, the one with the highest circulation was used. A core collection of trade journals was established which, when combined with a careful assessment of the needs of users, should be of value to those charged with collection development.     

A study of the access to the scholarly record from a hospital health science core collection

This study is an effort to determine possible service performance levels in hospital libraries based on access to the scholarly record of medicine through selected lists of clinical journals and indexing and abstracting journals. The study was designed to test a methodology as well as to provide data for planning and management decisions for health science libraries. Findings and conclusions cover the value of a core collection of journals, length of journal files, performance of certain bibliographic instruments in citation verification, and the implications of study data for library planning and management.     

Mapping the literature of hospital pharmacy

Objectives

This study describes the literature of hospital pharmacy and identifies the journals most commonly cited by authors in the field, the publication types most frequently cited, the age of citations, and the indexing access to core journals. The study also looks at differing citation practices between journals with a wide audience compared to a national journal with a focus on regional issues and trends in the field.

Method

Cited references from five discipline-specific source journals were collected and analyzed for publication type and age. Two sets were created for comparison. Bradford''s Law of Scattering was applied to both sets to determine the most frequently cited journals.

Results

Three-quarters of all cited items were published within the last 10 years (71%), and journal articles were the most heavily cited publication type (n=65,760, 87%). Citation analysis revealed 26 journal titles in Zone 1, 177 journal titles in Zone 2, and the remaining were scattered across 3,886 titles. Analysis of a national journal revealed Zone 1 comprised 9 titles. Comparison of the 2 sets revealed that Zone 1 titles overlapped, with the exception of 2 titles that were geographically focused in the national title.

Conclusion

Hospital pharmacy literature draws heavily from its own discipline-specific sources but equally from core general and specialty medical journals. Indexing of cited journals is complete in PubMed and EMBASE but lacking in International Pharmaceutical Abstracts. Gray literature is a significant information source in the field.     

Drilling deeper into the core: an analysis of journal evaluation methodologies used to create the “Basic List of Veterinary Medical Serials,” third edition

Objective:

The paper analyzes the journal evaluation criteria used to create the third edition of a core list of veterinary serials to determine the impact of each criterion on the final composition of the list in order to assess the value of using multiple criteria in creating a core list.

Methods:

Three additional lists were generated from criteria that were previously combined to prepare the third edition of the “Basic List of Veterinary Medical Serials”: a list based on journal recommendations from veterinary specialty organizations, another list based on journals selected by veterinary librarians, and a list based on both indexing coverage and scholarly rank. The top fifteen journals in each of the three lists were then compared to reveal potential biases. Subject representation on the full lists generated by each of these methods was also compared.

Results:

The list based on journal recommendations from veterinary specialty organizations exhibited a focus on clinically relevant titles. The list based on veterinary librarian recommendations resulted in the broadest subject coverage. The list based on indexing and scholarly rank, while emphasizing research titles, produced the largest number of unique titles.

Conclusion:

A combination approach that includes objective evaluation measures and practical input, whether from librarians or discipline experts, can improve coverage and can result in a list that balances research-based with clinical practice journals.

Highlights

• Analysis of criteria used to create the “Basic List of Veterinary Medical Serials” reveals biases inherent in different quality measures that result in different journal emphases.
• Use of indexing or scholarly rank is often thought of as a limiting factor, but in this study, the journals that were scored solely on these two criteria resulted in the inclusion of the greatest number of unique titles.
• Librarian input produced the broadest subject coverage of any list.

Implications

• An analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies reveals clear evidence for using both objective and subjective criteria in developing a core list. Collection development decisions would equally benefit from this approach.
• Comparison of the top titles on core lists underscores the value of input from practitioners or discipline experts in collection decisions.
• Bias toward clinical content revealed in the input from the veterinary specialty organizations indicates the importance of understanding the purpose and compilation methods used in creating recommended lists before using them in collection development.

     

Library lists: core or apple?

Core lists for medical libraries are intended to offer a minimal coverage of the medical literature. But they have grave drawbacks: (1) The coverage of some specialties is so minimal in several well-known lists as to be misleading. (2) A small hospital lacking a specialist in a particular branch of medicine does not need a specialist journal in that branch. Such a journal is better borrowed from a neighbouring hospital where the appropriate specialist can also be consulted. (3) Many hospitals will stick only to the core list, leading to excessive uniformity across the country.What librarians should be offered is a list of about 300-400 journals from which to make a selection on the following criteria: (1) The preference of the doctors who use the library. (2) The availability of journals in neighbouring libraries. (3) The budget.     

Toward a Sustainable Method for Core Journal Lists: A Test Case Using Journals in Social Work

Determining the core journals in a discipline serves an important role for both academic librarians and departmental faculty. In addition to helping librarians build or weed journal collections, especially in difficult budget years, core lists help departments seeking accreditation, committees evaluating a candidate’s scholarship for tenure and promotion, and faculty choosing publications for their research. They also assist faculty guiding student research in the discipline. However, because of the inexorable changes that have occurred, and will continue to occur, in scholarly communication, no such list can be considered immutable. The purpose of this study is to identify a method by which individual librarians and/or libraries can create a list of journals considered important to a discipline, one that accurately reflects the state of scholarly communication in a field as it relates to the currency and quality of journal literature, and that is sustainable over time. More specifically, our purpose is twofold. First, to develop a sustainable method for defining the universe of potential core titles; and, second, to identify the core titles within that universe. As the result of discussions on this issue with a social work faculty member, the authors used social work journals for developing a methodology that may be applied to other disciplines.     

高校人文社科外文印刷版期刊馆藏状况分析：1996-2008

本文通过对《全国高校图书馆进口报刊预订联合目录》（1996-2008）历年期刊目录数据的分析,从文献的地区布局、学科分布以及核心期刊订购情况等方面,描述我国高校人文社科外文印刷版期刊十余年来馆藏发展的总体情况。     

Current awareness in the new millennium: RSS

Keeping current is essential for both patrons and librarians in the health sciences. We receive electronic and photocopied tables of contents. We subscribe to relevant mailing lists, newspapers and magazines. We review Web sites, books and journals. Our desks are littered with current awareness items that more often get old than read. RSS or "Really Simple Syndication' is a means of organizing and simplifying current awareness efforts. Using RSS feeds from a variety of sources along with aggregator software, librarians can keep up-to-date without the clutter. This article will provide a starting point from which to take advantage of RSS and continue the process of active learning.     

Themes of the publications of an organization as a basis for forming an objective and optimal repertoire of scientific periodicals

This paper considers a new model for forming ranked lists of scientific journals on the basis of a bibliometric analysis. The model is based on searching in anabstract database of a set of articles that is semantically equivalent to a set of articles of a user or group of users, for whom a repertoire of scientific periodicals is selected. In other words, a query must result in an assembly of articles with the same thematic orientation, which is expressed in the articles of an author. To achieve this goal, KeyWords Plus were used as a query for articles by workers from three scientific organizations in different scientific fields (biomedical, geological, and physico-mathematical fields). KeyWords Plus, which give a short retelling of each article, are joined in a query into groups, whose number was correspondingly equal to the number of articles of workers from these organizations. The query yielded lists of articles withthe same sequences of keywords, which proved their semantic proximity. Using different filters we analyzed the groups of journals that focused articles that are of interest to us to the greatest extent. The obtained lists were compared with the lists of journals that are most cited by the authors of the articles; the similarity of the lists in the field of natural sciences was ascertained to be significant and the similarity in the field of exact sciences was shown to be less. The possible spheres for the application of the KeyWords Plus method, which is an alternative to an analysis of citations, as well as the applicability of a new model to the Scopus database, where controlled thesauri are used as additional keywords, are described.     

Psychiatric resources: a core list for the small psychiatric hospital library

There is a dearth of core lists for the mental health librarian and materials must be selected from several sources. This list is described as "basic," but it does provide a core collection of books, journals and Web sites which can be used by mental health librarians to build or evaluate collections. "Classics" not contained in this list should also be included in library collections as well as a comprehensive handbook, Tasman's Psychiatry, to which mental health practitioners can refer for a quick answer to a question. Most importantly, the library collection should reflect the purposes and philosophy of the medical staff and institution it supports.     

A comparison of journal coverage in Psychological Abstracts and the primary health sciences indexes: implications for cooperative serials acquisition and retention

An overlap study was performed to identify important psychology journals that are also of interest to biomedical scientists and health care practitioners. The journal lists of Index Medicus, Hospital Literature Index, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and International Nursing Index were compared with the journal list of Psychological Abstracts. A total of 357 Psychological Abstracts titles were also in one or more of the health sciences indexes. A core list of forty-five titles covered by all of the indexes is presented in the Appendix. Results of the study are discussed vis-à-vis cooperative serials acquisition and retention efforts.     

Open Access Journals in College Library Collections

Students and scholars can take full advantage of Open Access journals only if libraries make them available through mechanisms that are familiar to patrons. This study examines the extent to which American liberal arts colleges have provided access to Open Access journals through their journal title lists (Serials Solutions, Ex Libris, etc.) and their online public access catalogs (OPACs). While 57 percent of the colleges provide access to at least 90 percent of the journals in our sample, 20 percent of the colleges provide access to fewer than 20 percent of the journals. Large and high-impact journals are especially likely to appear in libraries' catalogs and journal lists. There is no systematic trend by publication fee status or country of publication, however. The study concludes with a discussion of the strategies libraries can use to select Open Access journals and add them to their collections.     

Measuring the Quality of Contributions of Saudi Authors to LIS Journals Using Journal Impact Factor (JIF), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and Google Scholar Metrics (GSM)

This research study evaluates the quality of articles published by Saudi and expatriate authors in foreign Library and Information Science (LIS) journals using three popular metrics for ranking journals—Journal Impact Factor (JIF), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and Google Scholar Metrics (GSM). The reason for using multiple metrics is to see how closely or differently journals are ranked by the three different methods of citation analysis. However, the 2012 JIF list of journals is too small, almost half the size of the SJR and GSM lists, which inhibited one-to-one comparison among the impact factors of the thirty-six journals selected by Saudi authors for publishing articles. Only seventeen journals were found common to all the three lists, limiting the usefulness of the data. A basic problem is that Saudi LIS authors generally lack the level of competency in the English language required to achieve publication in the most prominent LIS journals. The study will have implications for authors, directors, and deans of all types of academic libraries; chairmen and deans of library schools; and the Saudi Library Association. Hopefully these entities will take necessary steps to prepare and motivate both academics and practicing librarians to improve the quality of their research and publications and thus get published in higher ranked journals.     

Creating Core Serials Lists in a Public Library

The creation of two core serials lists, a general reference serials list and a general periodicals list, is examined in a case study of a medium-sized, multi-branch public library. Definition, purpose and background of core serials lists are given, and the methodologies for creating core lists of serials for various purposes are reviewed. The process of core serials list creation at the Tucson Public Library is described and recommendations for other small and medium public libraries wishing to develop and maintain their own core lists are made.     

确证与辨证——优化中医药学术期刊的选题策划

从编辑视角看中医药学术期刊的选题策划对中医药学科发展的促进作用,进而影响中医药学术话语能力的提升。中医药学术期刊的选题策划宜从2个角度入手:一为确证角度,是一种以科学语言为基础的通识性表述,是突破中医药与其他学科进行学术沟通瓶颈的手段;二为辨证角度,是中医药增强学术自信的灵魂,是构建中医话语体系的出发点和落脚点。二者不可偏废。     

Citation bias in otolaryngology systematic reviews

Objective:Reproducibility of systemic reviews (SRs) can be hindered by the presence of citation bias. Citation bias may occur when authors of SRs conduct hand-searches of included study reference lists to identify additional studies. Such a practice may lead to exaggerated SR summary effects. The purpose of this paper is to examine the prevalence of hand-searching reference lists in otolaryngology SRs.Methods:The authors searched for systematic reviews published in eight clinical otolaryngology journals using the Cochrane Library and PubMed, with the date parameter of January 1, 2008, to December 31, 2017. Two independent authors worked separately to extract data from each SR for the following elements: whether reference lists were hand-searched, other kinds of supplemental searching, PRISMA adherence, and funding source. Following extraction, the investigators met to review discrepancies and achieve consensus.Results:A total of 539 systemic reviews, 502 from clinical journals and 37 from the Cochrane library, were identified. Of those SRs, 72.4% (390/539) hand-searched reference lists, including 97.3% (36/37) of Cochrane reviews. For 228 (58.5%) of the SRs that hand-searched reference lists, no other supplemental search (e.g., search of trial registries) was conducted.Conclusions:These findings indicate that hand-searching reference lists is a common practice in otolaryngology SRs. Moreover, a majority of studies at risk of citation bias did not attempt to mitigate the bias by conducting additional supplemental searches. The implication is that summary effects in otolaryngology systematic reviews may be biased toward statistically significant findings.     

基于出版参数与文献计量学统计的医学核心期刊编辑出版策划

通过分析比较我国医学核心期刊、统计源期刊和一般期刊的出版参数和主要文献计量学指标,为医学中文核心期刊的编辑出版策划提供参考依据.结果显示: 中文核心期刊的论文平均长度、有英文摘要论文比、影响因子、总被引频次和基金论文比均显著高于统计源期刊和一般期刊.而中文核心期刊的出版频率、年总页码数显著高于统计源期刊,但低于一般期刊.在办刊实践中,必须采取综合措施,根据自身情况合理设置出版周期,在保证稿件质量的前提下适当扩大信息容量,多发表学术水平高的研究原著,论文尽可能附英文摘要,刊登论文适当向基金论文倾斜,以提高期刊的学术水平和影响力.