Selecting veterinary medical periodicals through citation analysis

Describes a study using citation analysis to select journals that could be used in the veterinary medical field. The study determines the principal journals to which a veterinary medical library should subscribe, thus obtaining the highest possible utility of materials. By using a database of 105 journals for a period of five years (1982‐86), citation data were applied on the Bradford bibliography and Bradford‐Zipf distribution to determine the ranking of journals in the field and the “core journals”. Reports the results of the study which discovered that the Bulletin of Animal Health and Production in Africa is the most cited journal with 305 citations, and the core journals were eight in number, having 1,067 citations representing 66.2 per cent of the total citations.