BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED MASTERS’ THESES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE TO SUPPORT COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT AT THE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY, MINNA BETWEEN 2008-2014

Abstract

Collection development is the process of identifying and analysing content and citation in various kind of library collections towards meeting the academic and research needs of researchers in an identified faculty or discipline. It also takes into account library collections, correlating them with the environmental aspects such as users’ demand, need and expectation, the information world, fiscal plan, history and trends of the collections. Bibliometrics is a vital tool for collection development in libraries because of the use of quantitative methods in seeking measurement and assessment of scientific publication outputs. It has realistic application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication. Citation analysis is a technique that embraces citation patterns in documents in order to link the connection between the documents and their original sources. It also recognize and appreciate the importance of seminal works in various fields of sciences and humanities, and to identify future research directions in a field of study. This study focused on citation analysis of selected masters’ theses in Computer Science submitted to Federal University of Technology, Minna Between 2008 to 2014. The population comprised selected masters’ theses in Computer Science available at the Federal University of Technology Library, Minna and were twenty (20) in number while the total enumeration sampling technique was used to determine the sample size. The study used quantitative method of research design and adopted total enumeration sampling technique for data collection. Three (3) document extraction templates that covered items relating to the study objectives were designed and used to collect data from twenty (20) copies of masters’ theses in the library. The study identifies the collaboration patterns, forms of document and chronological distributions of the cited references. The findings revealed that collaboration distributions of the cited references were mostly multidisciplinary (53.9%). The most cited forms of documents were journals (52%) and books (18%). It was observed that as at the time of citation of cited references, the documents were current and relevant to the topic of the study