Doctoral Theses in Environmental Science: An Obsolescence Study

Objectives Of The Study

The following are the main objectives of the study.

• 1.

  To determine the use of different forms of documents like books, journals, conference proceedings, theses etc.

• 2.

  To study the chronological and language wisedistribution of citations

• 3.

  To study the obsolescence and half-life of Environmental Science journal literature

• 4.

  To compile a rank list of core journals

• 5.

  To find out the availability of cited journals in the Kuvempu University Library

• 6.

  To apply Bradford’s law to the journal citations

Methodology

The methodology preferred for this study is based on the analysis of bibliographic references appended at the end of each chapter and footnotes, if any. The research design adopted was a descriptive study. Each thesis was manually examined and references were extracted from each of the thesis. All the references were noted down on 3”x 5” size standard catalogue card. Later the data were fed into the computer using MS-Excel software and data has been transferred to SPSS software to generate the tables, graphs and results.

66 doctoral theses submitted to the Kuvempu University in the field of Environmental Science during 1998-2012 have been taken as the source of data for the present study; these doctoral theses generated 14,668 total citations.Separate sheets and columns were created to enter data such as, number of theses submitted. Further, all the references cited in the collected theses were examined to enter the bibliographic data which include chronological wise, bibliographical form of cited documentsand so on. Duplicate citations were removed from the data set. But the ‘Ibid’ and ‘Opcit’ references were considered while entering the data.

The form of documents entered to the MS-Excel includes journals, books, conferences proceedings and reports etc. The date on journal citations were separated and used to create ranking list of journals, country-wise distribution of journals, and language of journals. Further, to know the availability of cited journals in the library.