CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.0 INTRODUCTION From the beginning of human civilization to the present day, information has been a component of growth and improvement in living standards of people. Today s modern societies are closely interlocked with growth and development of economic, political, social, occupational, cultural and other areas. But the concept of information has to be understood in its relation to many other related concepts to perceive the impact of information on modern societies. Application of information and knowledge for development and information technology with all its spectacular advances has been in fact the chief instrument of these revolutionary changes leading societies to an information age. Creation of new knowledge and information, their processing, storage and retrieval, dissemination has become critical in the age of information explosion. The increasing needs of the user communities, substantial increase in the cost of documents and the constraints of limited financial resources make it necessary for the librarians to design and develop need-based information systems and services to meet the information requirements of users. A thorough knowledge of the characteristics of the subject literature required by the users is very important in planning and designing such information systems and services. To tackle this, librarians have to use quantitative techniques effectively in identifying the information needs of the users. In order to overcome these problems and to acquire a thorough understanding of the characteristics of the literature, the early 20 th century document lists applied mathematical and statistical techniques to bibliographical units. This has led to the emergence of a new branch of knowledge in the field of Library and Information Science known as Bibliometrics. Bibliometric studies have been gaining significance in the field of library and information science in recent years. 1

1.1 HISTORY OF BIBLIOMETRICS Bibliometrics is of recent origin and a relatively new area of study, which has emerged as a research field in its own right in information science. It is now being vigorously pursued with the result that twenty five percent of all the articles published in Library and Information Science are on Bibliometrics and its related topics. It has been found that many of the social science and science periodicals are also carrying a large number of articles on Bibliometrics. Bibliometrics involves measurement of several interrelated aspects of writing and publication i.e., quantitative analysis of documents or written material. There has been considerable confusion in the terminology of the closely related Metric terms Bibliometrics, Scientometrics and Informetrics, Librametrics, Webometrics, Altmetrics etc., 1.1.1 Bibliometrtics Bibliometrics deals with some of the literature on the history of the three metric fields (which are Scientometrics, Informetrics and Librametrics), beginning with earliest Bibliometrics. Cole and Eales (1917) 1 did the first Bibliometric study on the history of Comparative Anatomy. Hulme (1923) 2 first used the expression Statistical Bibliography. Gross and Gross s (1923) 3 study was the third study in the field of bibliometrics. Henkle (1938) 4 used the term Statistical Bibliography in his article in the year 1938. Fussler (1948) 5, Raising (1962) 6 and Barker (1966) 7 used the term Statistical Bibliography in their works. Pritchard (1969) 8 used the term Statistical Bibliography in his works in preference to Bibliometrics. 2

Bibliometric methods have been applied in various studies for a century and for using statistical methods for studying subject scattering in publication. 1.1.2 Scientometrics The term Scientometrics originated as a Russian term for the application of quantitative methods to the history of science, but its scope and objectives have widened considerably. Scientometrics is a wide ranging field with vague boundaries. This term was introduced and came into prominence with the findings of the journal named Scientometrics by T.Brauin 1977, originally published in Hungary and currently from Amsterdam. The scope of the journal is to publish all those studies of quantitative aspects of science as a discipline or economic activity. Scientometrics is a part of the sociology of a science and has its application in science policy making. It involves quantitative studies of scientific activities, publication, and so overlaps bibliometrics to some extent. Scientometrics is a branch of the Science of Science. Nalimov and Mulchenko (1989) 9 define this term, as a sub-field which applies quantitative methods to the study of science as an information process. 1.1.3 Librametrics The term Librametrics was proposed by Ranganathan (1969) 10 in 1948 at the ASLIB conference in Lamington Spa on the lines of biometry, economery etc. Librametrics is the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to library problems. The Librametry primarily aims at the quantitative analysis of the management of libraries and Bibliometrics is limited to recorded knowledge 1.1.4 Informetrics The term Informetrics comes from the German term informetrie and was first proposed in 1979 to cover a part of information science dealing with the measurement of information phenomena and application of mathematical methods to 3

the discipline s problem, to Bibliometrics and parts of information retrieval theory. It covers the empirical studies of literature and documents as well as theoretical studies of the mathematical properties of the laws and distributions that have been discovered. Informetrics is the quantitative study of collections of moderate sized units of potentially informative text, directed to the scientific understanding of informing processes at the social level Wilson (2001) 11. 1.1.5 Webometrics Webometrics is the quantitative study of web phenomena, encompassing a variety of types of research. Some of these date back to the early years of the web although the wide spread adoption of the term itself is relatively new. Webometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the www drawing on Bibliometric and Informetric approaches. The term webometrics was coined by Thomas Almind along with Peter Ingwerson (1997) 12. The dynamic, diversified and far reaching nature of the web provides a fertile ground for knowledge discovery. Frequencies and patterns of word and phrase usage on web pages can provide information for search algorithms. The size and structure of the web sites around the world can provide extensive social, cultural, economic and political information. Web links, although individually less reliable sources of information than bibliographic citations, may reveal significant terms when aggregated over large areas of the web. The majority of the webometric studies so far have focused on academic and scholarly web sites through analogies with Bibliometrics. It is envisaged that future progress of Webometrics will prove the web to be one of the most valuable mainstream data sources for information science. 1.1.6 Altmetrics In scholarly and scientific publishing, Altmetrics are new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact factor and personal citation indices 4

like the h-index. The term Altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the Twitter # altmetrics hash tag. Although Altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc., Altmetrics cover not just citation counts, but also other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, download, or mentions in social media and news media. 1.2 DEFINITIONS OF BIBLIOMETRICS The word Bibliometrics is derived from the two Greek words biblio and metrikos meaning book and measurement. Bibliometrics is the science of measurement relating to books. The word measurement means the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to find out growth of documents, publication of documents by an author, impact of document and so on. The term Bibliometrics was defined by different authors in different ways. Some of main definitions are listed below: According to Hulme (1923) 13 the purpose of statistical bibliography is to shed light on the process of written communication and of the nature and course of development of a discipline, by means of counting and analyzing its various facts of written communication. Gosnell (1943) 14 and Ranganathan (1948) 15 coined the term Libra-metrics to describe many of the matters connected with library work and services, which involve large numbers. Fussler (1949) 16 and Pritchard (1969) 17 used the term Statistical Bibliography in their works. But latter used the term Statistical Bibliography in preference to Bibliometrics. Hawkins (1977) 18 interpreted bibliometrics in his on-line bibliometric study as the quantitative analysis of the bibliographic features of a body of literature. 5

1.3 CATEGORIES OF BIBLIOMETRIC STUDIES According to Nicholas and Ritchie (1978) 19 Bibliometrics is a quantitative science and it is divided into two basic categories: Descriptive Bibliometrics (Productivity count) and Evaluative Bibliometrics (Literature usage count) Descriptive Bibliometrics (or) Productivity count is divided into three types. These are: Geographic (Country wise) Time Period (Chronological) and Disciplines (Subject wise) The Evaluative Bibliometrics (or) the Literature usage count is bifurcated into two types. They are: Reference count and Citation count 1.4 CLASSIFICATION OF BIBLIOMETRICS Bibliometrics is classified as: Descriptive studies and Behavioural studies 1.4.1 Descriptive Studies The descriptive studies are most easily understood and can be thought of as resembling in many ways population censuses. Descriptive studies describe the 6

characteristics or features of a literature. Descriptive studies are not only concerned with representing faithfully the features present in the current literature, they are also interested in the condition of past literature, particularly in areas where past literature constitutes an important part of current research interest. 1.4.2 Behavioral Studies All documents rely to a greater or lesser extent on information contained within previously published documents. Inside the literature there exists, infact, a web of relationships. By exploring the full bibliographic ramifications of these relationships, the nature and strength of each relationship can be determined. The two major branches of bibliometric activity complement each other. The descriptive study furnishes a background of basic statistics against which the strength and significance of behavioral patterns can be assessed. 1.5 APPLICATIONS OF BIBLIOMETRICS The following are the applications of bibliometrics: To identify research trends and growth of knowledge; To identify users of different subjects; To estimate comprehensiveness of secondary periodicals; To identify authorship and its trends in documents of various subjects; To develop experimental models correlating or by passing the existing ones; To measure the usefulness of adhoc and retrospective SDI services; To study the past and present publishing trends and to forecast future publishing trends; To identify core periodicals in different disciplines; 7

To initiate effective multilevel network system; To adopt an accurate weeding and stacking policy; To design automatic language processing for auto-increasing, auto abstracting and auto-classification; and To develop norms for standardization. Bibliometric studies are applicable in many fields of knowledge such as selection of books and periodicals (i.e., documents), features of subject literature, evaluation of collection and bibliographies, historical and sociological studies Lalwani (1981) 20. According to Ravichandra Rao (1983) 21 Bibliometric studies are used in the identification of trends in a subject and also in the study of scientific communication. According to Lancaster (1991) 22 Bibliometric studies are applicable to any form of quantitative analysis relating to the production, distribution and use of the published or semi-published literature. To summarize, Bibliometric studies have a wide range of applications in such areas as book and journal acquisitions, study of communication patterns, library use analysis, obsolescence of literature, identification of specialties and identification of influential authors and papers. Bibliometric studies have proved that bibliometric indicators play an important role in science policy decisions and in the evaluation of research performances. There is considerable evidence that bibliometric indicators play an important role as evaluation tools of individual scientists or research group. 1.5.1 Laws of Bibliometrics Three laws became the corner stones of bibliometrics. They are Bradford s law of scattering. 8

Lotka s Inverse Square Law of Scientific Productivity of authors, and Zipf s Law of word occurrence or word count. These three laws deal with the number of authors contributing to the growth of a discipline, the distribution of articles in a set of journals, and the ranking of word frequency in a particular set of documents. 1.5.1.1 Bradfords Law of Scattering Bradford (1934) 23 published his first paper entitled Sources of information on specific subjects. He observed and examined two bibliographies prepared in the Science Library (Britain) on Applied Geophysics (1928-1931) and Lubrication (1932-1937). He prepared a list of journals arranged in decreasing order of source items contributed by the journals of bibliographies. He noticed that in each subject there were a few productive sources, large number of sources which were moderately productive and still a large number of sources of constantly diminishing productivity. Bradford identified three groups of periodicals in the list of periodicals ranked by diminishing productivity that produced approximately the same number of articles on the subject, but the number of periodicals in these three equi-productive zones increased by a constant factor. If scientific periodicals are arranged in the order of decreasing productivity of articles on a given subject, that may be divided into a nucleus of periodicals, more particularly devoted to the subject, and several groups or zones containing the same number of articles as the nucleus, where the number of periodicals in the nucleus and succeeding zones will be as 1:n:n2 Bradford also plotted graph of the cumulative number of source items R(n) versus the logarithm of the cumulative number of journals (log n). Such a graph is called as Bradford Bibliograph. 9

1.5.1.2 Lotka s Law Lotka (1926) 24 proposed his inverse square law in 1926 correlating contributors of scientific papers to their number of contributions. Lotka s law provided fundamental and theoretical basis for Bibliometric studies involving authorship. Lotka was interested in determining the part which men of different caliber contribute to the progress of science. To do this, he checked the decennial index of Chemical Abstracts 1907-1916 and counted the number of names against which appeared 1,2,3 etc., entries. He analysed the data of 6,891 names beginning with letters A and B similarly the data from the Aurbach s Geschietftafelnder physic was also collected for 1325 physcists. Lotka then plotted the graph on logarithm scale, the number of authors against the number of contributions made by each author and he found that in each case the points were closely scattered about a straight line, having a slope of approximately two to one. On the basis of this data, Lotka deduced a general equation for the relation between the frequency Y of persons making X contributions as X n Y= Constant For the special case n=2, the constant is 0.6079. He summarized the result in this statement. In the case examined, it is found that the number of persons making two contributions is 1/4 th of those making one contribution, the number making n contributions is about 1/n 2 of those making one and the proportion of contributions is about 60%. 10

In other words, for every 100 authors contributing one article, 25 contributed 2 articles, about 11 contributed 3 articles, 6 contributed 4 articles and so on. This law was based on the study of chemistry and physics literature, later it generated much interest and attracted the attention of researchers and it has been applied and tested in many other fields. 1.5.1.3 Zipf s Law Zipf (1949) 25 developed and extended an empirical law, as observed by Estoup govering a relation between the rank of a word and the frequency of its appearance in a long text. Zipf s Law can be stated as follows Rf=c Where r is the rank of a word, f is its frequency and c is a constant. In a long textual matter, if words are arranged in their decreasing order of frequency, then the rank of any given word of the text will be inversely proportional to the frequency of occurrence of the word. 1.6 CITATION ANALYSIS Citations are becoming a major type of raw data for the study of information. Citations are the references placed at the end of any scholarly paper, to those articles, previously published, that the author made use of ion his own paper. Citation Analysis is concerned with the literature usage count i.e., literature used by the author, and of references cited by the researchers in their papers and citations. The analysis of citation references/cited references made in published books and articles to the writings of other authors. 11

Citation Analysis helps in measuring the relative importance or quality of contribution. Citation Analysis shows the status of scientist/esteem Citation Analysis helps in finding important contributions of authors/ scientists in the field. Citation analysis helps in evaluating scientific activities. Citation Analysis is an effective tool in quantitative studies of science and technology. Citation Analysis in simple terms means the analysis of the citations or references appended to primary communication publications. Citation implies s a relationship between a part or the whole of the cited document and a part or the whole of the citing document. Malin (1968) 26 Citations are signposts left behind after information has been utilized and as such provide data by which one may build pictures of user behavior without ever confronting the user himself. Any set of documents containing reference list can provide the raw materials for citation analysis and citation counts based on a given set of documents are precise and objectives. Smith (1981) 27 There are a number of reasons why citations exists, there may be a number of reasons why a citing document has not provided a link to certain other documents. The most obvious reason is that a work in question is not relevant to the previous document or due to the fact that the citing author was not aware of the existence of the document or the document was not acceptable to the citing author or the author could not read it because of the language barrier. 12

1.6.1 Terms used in Citation Analysis The following terms are used in citation analysis: 1.6.1.1 Citation Citations are the references given at the end of scholarly papers, to the articles of documents previously published. The very fact of that a work is cited in a paper indicates that there is some relationship between two papers. In other words, if an author is citing a reference in his paper, there is a strong possibility that his own paper is related to it. Similarly citations help us to arrive at many conclusions with respect to the growth and developments of scientific knowledge citations normally provided in the bibliographic data about the used documents. 1.6.1.2 Co-citation The term Co-citation concept was introduction by Small (1937) 28 in 1973, to refer to clusters of related papers. Co-citation pattern indicates the probable relationship that exists when the two citations are cited together. The frequency of their occurrences together determine the strength of linkage. It represents the degree of relationship among the papers as observed by the practicing scientists. 1.6.1.3 Citation counting Citation counting is a technique that determines how many citations a given document, author, journal etc., has received over a period of time. It refers to comparative studies of counting the number of citations made in citing papers or documents. 1.6.1.4 Bibliographic coupling The concept bibliographic coupling was first suggested by Fano (1936) 29, but Kessler (1983) 30 elaborated, tested and coined the term bibliographic coupling. 13

It is the number of common references cited in two documents that indicates the degree of similarity of contents of the citing papers. 1.6.1.5 Self-citation Citation or the practice of citing one s own previous work in later papers written by him is called self-citation. Self-citation is a self serving practice. It can be a result of the perfectly normal tendency of scientist to build on his or her own work. In fact there are three types of self-citation. They are : Self-citation of subjects Self-citation of journals and Self-citation of authors. 1.6.1.6 Direct citation Garfield (1928) 31 developed the idea of direct citation pattern to study variety of probable relationship among the citing and cited papers. If an author is citing any reference in his paper, there is a strong possibility it may be related to it. Direct citation has been used by researchers to establish relationship among documents and researchers. 1.6.1.7 Half-life citation Half-life citation is defined as the period during which one half of the currently cited literature was published. The half-life of citations decay is same as the half-life for literature growth. Half-life citation provides quantitative measure of the rate at which scientific papers become obsolete. 1.6.2 Citation Indexing Citation Indexing was introduced to solve the problems of traditional indexing system. Citation indexing was based on these two assumptions. 14

A document giving citations of the previously published document indicates subject relationship between the current document and the old document. The document which cite the same subject relationship with each other. 1.6.2.1 History of citation indexing Citation indexing was originated in the United States of America. Frank Shepard s Citation Index was the first pioneering effort, which applied this technique in 1873, which is concerned with law. In 1952, the Welch Project is concerned with the indexing of Medical Literature, applied the Shepard s techniques to the indexing of scientific literature. 1.6.2.2 Science Citation Index (SCI) The writings of Eugene Garfield are responsible to popularize the functions of Citations indexing, need of planning, organizational effectiveness, utilizations and usefulness in employing this method for the Bibliographical control of scientific Literature. The national institute of Health (USA) and the institute for scientific information joined hands together and the first Science Citation Index (SCI) was brought out as an experimental project in 1961. 1.6.2.3 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) SSCI commenced its publication in 1973. As SCI covers scientific literature in science and technology, the SSCI covers literature in social sciences. SSCI indexes every article and significant editorial from world s one thousand most important social science journals. It also selectively covers another 2200 journals from natural, physical and biomedical science and indexes these articles, which are relevant to the social sciences, like SCI, SSCI consists of Citation Index. Source Index. Permuterm Subject Index. 15

Like SCI each of these parts of SSCI is published quarterly for the first three quarters of the years. Incorporating all of these is an annual volume in the fourth quarter. Entries in all the parts of SSCI follow exactly the same pattern or form as in SCI. The success of a citation index is dependent on the efficiency of citation practices of authors. If the authors are conscientious and cite only proper references then the relation between the cited document and the citing documents will be correctly reflected and the citation index will function properly, if the ill practices in preparing citations are continued, then the citation indexing will lose much of its effectiveness. SCI has solved most of the problems of inherent among conventional indexes. The relevance of these SCI, SSCI etc. indexes and indexing services, if pursued carefully, can make a user fairly acquainted with these Bibliographical tools. Knowledge about these indexes and also knowledge about how to use these indexes will enable a user to have an effective Bibliographical control. 1.7 REASONS FOR GIVING CITATIONS Giving citations is a purely private process and therefore, subjective also. There are many reasons why authors cite the works of others. Weinstock (1971) 32 isolates or has given 15 specific reasons for using citations. Paying homage to pioneers. Giving credit for related work (homage to peers). Identifying methodology, equipment etc., Providing background reading. Correcting one s own work. Correcting the work of others. Criticizing the work of others. 16

Alerting researchers to forthcoming works. Substantiating claims. Providing leads to poorly disseminated, poorly indexed or un-cited work. Authenticating data and classes of fact-physical constant etc., Identifying original publications describing an eponymous concept or term. E.g. Hodgkin s disease. Identifying the original publications in which an idea or constant was discussed Disclaiming work or ideas of others and Disputing priority claims of others. 1.8 ECONOMICS The following paragraphs gives a brief account of the subject Economics. 1.8.1 History of Economics Social science research, especially of the applied variety is of recent origin. Social science are those studies of men which seek to discover what is true about life. Social science is that branch of knowledge which cover the study of men in relation to society. It has vast range of interest and it attempts for development of their activities. For the beginning social science has played a significant role as far as the subjects derived from knowledge are concerned. The history of social sciences can be traced back to the beginnings of the 20th century. Among different social science disciplines, economics and political science were the first to gain recognition as independent or autonomous disciplines. The disciplines of sociology, psychology and anthropology were latecomers on the scene and are still in the adolescence. The word Economics is derived from a Greek word oikonomikos, which means household management. Economics does not study how a person is born grows 17

up and dies. Economics tells us how a man utilizes his limited resources for the satisfaction of his unlimited wants. Economics is best described as the study of humans behaving in response to having only limited resources to fulfill unlimited wants and needs. Scarcity refers to the limited resources in an economy. Macroeconomics is the study of the economy as a whole. Microeconomics analyzes the individual people and companies that make up the greater economy. The Production Possibility allows us to determine how an economy can allocate its resources in order to achieve optimal output. Knowing this will lead countries to specialize and trade products amongst each other rather than each producing all the products it needs. Demand and supply refer to the relationship price has with the quantity consumers demand and the quantity supplied by producers. As price increases, quantity demanded decreases and quantity supplied increases. Utility is the amount of benefit a consumer receives from a given good or service. Economists use utility to determine how an individual can get the most satisfaction out of his or her available resources. Market economies are assumed to have many buyers and sellers, high competition and many substitutes. Monopolies characterize industries in which the supplier determines prices and high barriers prevent any competitors from entering the market. Oligopolies are industries with a few interdependent companies. Perfect competition represents an economy with many businesses competing with one another for consumer interest and profits. 1.8.2 Branches of Economics The subject of economics can be divided into two branches. 1. Micro Economics 2. Macro Economics Micro economics is popularized by Alfred Marshall. It is also known as price theory the term micro means a millionth part. It studies about individual units such as the income of a form, the mark statement of a particular person. 18

Macro means big/large. Macro economics is a study of the system as a whole. It studies national income, general price level, national output etc., It is popularized by J. M. Keynes. Where micro economics explains a tree in the forest, macro economics explains the trees in the forest. 1.8.3 Importance of Microeconomics Micro economics studies behavior of individual consumer or producer in a particular situation. Resources are already scarce i.e., less in quantity. Micro economics helps in proper allocation and utilization of resources to produce various types of goods and services. Micro economics decides prices of various goods and services on the basis of Demand-Supply Analysis. Micro economics helps in formulating various economic policies and economic plans to promote all round economic development. Micro economics explain operating of a free enterprise economy where individual has freedom to take his own economic decisions. Public Finance It helps the government in fixing the tax rate and the type of tax as well as the amount of tax to be charged to the buyer and the seller. Foreign Trade It helps in explaining and fixing international trade and tariff rules, causes of disequilibrium in BOP, effects of factors deciding exchange rate, etc. Social Welfare It not only analyses economic conditions but also studies the social needs under different market conditions like monopoly, oligopoly, etc. 19

1.8.4 Importance of Macroeconomics It helps to understand the functioning of a complicated modern economic system. It describes how the economy as a whole functions and how the level of national income and employment is determined on the basis of aggregate demand and aggregate supply. It helps to achieve the goal of economic growth, higher level of GDP and higher level of employment. It analyses the forces that determine economic growth of a country and explains how to reach the highest state of economic growth and sustain it. It helps to bring stability in price level and analyses fluctuations in business activities. It suggests policy measures to control inflation and deflation. It explains factors which determine balance of payment. At the same time, it identifies causes of deficit in balance of payment and suggests remedial measures. It helps to solve economic problems like poverty, unemployment, inflation, deflation etc., whose solution is possible at macro level only, i.e., at the level of whole economy. With detailed knowledge of functioning of an economy at macro level, it is possible to formulate correct economic policies and also coordinate international economic policies. Last but not the least merit is that macroeconomic theory has saved us form the dangers of application of microeconomic theory to the problems of the economy as a whole. Research is a continuous process in any field and economics is no exception. The analysis for the growth and trend of doctoral researches in Three Universities in economics is based on literature survey. The list 268 theses, available in the 3 Universities for doctoral degrees in economics during the year 1955-2010. 20

1.9 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY The following are the specific objectives of the present study: 1. To know the various sources of information consulted by the researchers in Economics; 2. To observe the nature of authorship pattern in the literature of Economics; 3. To examine the core journals of Economics; 4. To study the distribution of citations by subject, country of origin and language; 5. To examine the applicability of Bradford s Law of scattering to the pattern of journals used by the researchers in Economics and 6. To find the obsolescence of literature used, and 7. To assess the availability of the cited journal articles and journals in the libraries of Sri Venkateswara University, Osmania University and Andhra University. 1.10 HYPOTHESES OF THE STUDY 1. Journals are the mostly cited sources by the researchers in the field of Economics. 2. Researchers of Economics prefer Indian journals rather than foreign journals. 3. The half-life value of book citations is high compared to journal citations in Economics. 4. Single authorship is high compared to collaborative authorship in the field of Economics. 5. The cited journal literature in Economics is published by developing countries. 6. The literature of Economics is found predominantly in English language. 21

1.11 METHODOLOGY The present study is confined to the analysis of citations cited in the Ph.D. theses available in the field of Economics in Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati; Osmania University, Hyderabad; and Andhra University, Visakhapatnam from a total of two hundred and sixty eight (268) Ph.D. theses available in the subject area of Economics during the years 1955 2010. Theses are used as source material for the present investigation. The data collected from 41,790 citations which appended to the 268 theses. The methodology with regard to distribution of citations according to various bibliometric forms authorship pattern, ranking journals, Bradford s Law of Scattering, Productivity of journals, Obsolescence of literature, Test of exponentially of distribution of cited data, Half-life of literature and the availability of journal literature. The analysis with respect to the different characteristics of literature is carried out on the total citations appended to the theses in Economics. If the citation is from a journal, the information regarding the country of publication, language in which it is published and the subject of the journal is obtained from Ulrich s International Periodicals Directory and recorded on the reference cards. The data is fed into the computer using Ms-Excel software package and processed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). 1.12 SCOPE The present study is concerned with the analysis of citations cited in the Ph.D theses accepted in the field of Economics for the award of Doctoral degrees by Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, Osmania University, Hyderabad and Andhra University, Visakhapatnam during the period 1955-2013. Two hundred and sixty eight theses are available in three Universities have been taken for this study. 22

1.13 PRESENTATION OF DATA The data was presented in the form of tables, bar diagrams and graphs. The bibliographic details of references cited in each chapter were given at the end of that chapter. Indian Standard: 2381-1978 was used for providing details of bibliographical items cited in the text and for preparing bibliography. 23

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