Purpose
The purpose of this study is the application of a recently developed quantitative method named Referenced Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) in the spectrum of Collection Development. RPYS portrays peak years to be recognized in citations in a research field that guarantees to assist in the identification of significant contributions and groundbreaking revelations in a research field.
Design/methodology/approach
Preliminary data of the study has been extracted from Web of Science (WoS) by using two phrases “collection development” and “collection building” to search in terms of the topic (comprising four parts: title, abstract, author keywords and KeyWords Plus). The search was restricted to the time period 1974-2017, which formulated a data set of 1,682 documents covering 29,017 cited references. The program CRExplorer (www.crexplorer.net) was used for the extraction of cited references from the data sets downloaded from WoS. Further analysis was performed manually using MS-Excel 2016.
Findings
The present study identified seminal works, which contributed to a high extent to the evolution and development of collection development. The analysis of all cited references using the RPYS method showed nine peaks, which present historical roots of collection development and revealed that the basic idea of this very subfield of library science dates centuries back. Moreover, the results of the investigation on most effective documents (in the form of peaks) revealed that the field of collection development significantly influenced by the works of authors such as Gabriel Naudé, Gabriel Peignot, Giulio Petzholdt, P L Gross, E M Gross, Richard Trueswell, Allen Kent, Ross Atkinson, etc.
Practical implications
The analysis of works cited in publications helps to ascertain important intellectual contributions related to a particular domain of knowledge. It not only helps in extracting the most important works but also it helps to reconstruct the history of a specific research field by examining the specific role of the cited references. Therefore, the results of the study could be useful for researchers, practitioners, scholars and more specifically bibliophiles, bibliographers and librarians to gain a better understanding of seminal works in the spectrum of collection development.
Originality/value
To the best of authors’ knowledge, the present research work is unique and novel in the spectrum of collection development, which explored and examined the pivotal works in the field by using the RPYS method.
The current work examines surrogacy-related research all over the world during the period 2007-2016. Data were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection. Several steps were taken to identify articles on surrogacy and ultimately, any article that has the word ‘surrogacy’ in the paper title, abstract; author keywords and KeyWords Plus were identified. The process yielded 435 articles for further analysis. It was anticipated that the results would provide insight into the existing research trends and help researchers to discern the direction of science in surrogacy research in world. Such a comprehensive overview of current state of surrogacy research is important for both researchers as well as policy makers where the research is taking place.
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