CITATION ANALYSES AS INDICATORS OF THE USE OF SERIALS: A COMPARISON OF RANKED TITLE LISTS PRODUCED BY CITATION COUNTING AND FROM USE DATA

Lists of journals ranked according to number of citations received are frequently used as indicators of usefulness, but little research has been carried out to test the validity of this hypothesis. On comparing lists of titles of journals ranked by citation counting with lists of the same journals, ranked according to frequency of use (using data from a survey at the National Lending Library), it was found that the rank order correlation between the two was low. This suggests that ranked lists produced by analyses of citations do not constitute valid guides for journal selection by libraries.