Investing Wisely: Citation Rankings as a Measure of Quality in Library and Information Science Journals

The library and information science field is currently confronted with difficult decisions about how best to allocate acquisition expenditures among increasingly expensive journals. This article measures the return-on-investment of serial expenditures through the use of citation analysis, which is a widely used approach to ascertaining journal quality. The frequency of citations to 116 library science journals in the bibliographies of 11 premier library journals over the period 2002–2005 is tabulated, and a price-per-citation figure (based on subscription prices) is also computed.