Abstract

Author(s): Koteppa Banateppanavar, B S Biradar

The present study is to identify the resources cited in doctoral theses submitted for the award of doctoral degree in the field of Biotechnology, Kuvempu University, Karnataka, India during 2003 to 2012 with the aim of improving the existing collection of the library. Also it helps to other academic libraries in the same field. 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 citations were extracted from each of the thesis. All the references were noted down on 5”x 3” size standard catalogue card. Later the data were fed into the computer using MS-Excel and separate sheets and columns were created to enter data finally data has been transferred to SPSS software for analysis. The present study results reveals that journals have the highest number of citations accounting to 84.57% of the total citations. It shows the researchers in the field of Biotechnology are mainly depending upon journals for collecting the information. In addition, more cited materials were contributed by the multi authors and degree of collaboration was found 0.86. Journal of Ethnopharmacology published from Ireland occupies the first rank as the most preferred journal having been cited 558 (3.52%) times. Further bradfords law was applied and studied the obsolescence of journal literature. Finally half-life of journal citations was found 10 years old in the field of Biotechnology. The result of this study is an original research work with application of bradfords law and obsolescence study of biotechnology literature. Study represents the availability of information and information used by the researchers in the field of Biotechnology for their research work.