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By analyzing the citation patterns of the linguistics literature, the authors provide a bibliometric description of the discipline that will help librarians who have reference, instruction, or collection development responsibilities in this area understand it better. One important aspect of such an understanding is determining where linguistics classifies within the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. Based on several of the citation patterns discovered, namely the importance of recent publications to the field, and the prominence of journals as a primary vehicle of scholarly communication, this analysis concludes that linguistics more closely resembles the disciplines of the social sciences.

shows an mcreasmg recent m-, ~~~~ terest in the patterns of citation and reference for the humanities literature. Though most of these studies follow the lead of earlier work in the sciences and social sciences, there were isolated studies of humanities citation patterns in the literature as early as 1959 and 1960. Librarians have sought to understand which sources are most used by researchers so as to be able to supply those items in times of budgetary crisis when cuts in acquisitions have been inevitable; scholars over the past fifteen years have adopted or adapted such techniques from the sciences and social sciences as citation studies to gain a clearer, less subjective view of what materials function as core collections for the various disciplines.These studies, while using the methodology developed in the sciences and social sciences, have found significant differences between the use of the journal literature in the sciences and social sciences and that of the humanities. The collection and evaluation of data determining which books, journal articles, manuscripts, and dissertations have been cited by scholars in their work and the currency of these materials have been used for both theoretical and more controversially practical ends. As well as providing a means to augment the researcher's knowledge of the , shape of a discipline's literature, administrators have used this data in promotion and tenure decisions, and librarians have used it in the development of collection development guidelines.Citation studies can be performed by a single individual in a relatively short time

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