A Study on the Selecting Method of Books for the Medical Library in Korea; Citation Countung and Analysis of the Medical Literature

한국의학도서관(韓國醫學圖書館)에 있어서의 도서선택방법(圖書選擇方法)에 관한 연구(硏究) -인용문헌(引用文獻)의 계수(計數)와 분석(分析)을 중심(中心)으로-

The purpose of this study is to make a contribution to the effective management of medical literature in Korean libraries and specifically to help to select medical books and periodicals by determining the value and life of medical literature by means of citation counting and analysis. This report will present methods of calculation and data collection to measure the importance, half life of medical literature and the authority of author for Korean medical libraries. The writer conducted comparative studies based on data covering a two-year period, 1970-1971, using about 16,899 citations in 1,032 articles of the above journals. The references and citations are counted and analyzed by the number of authors, periodicals. books and publication dates. By the following ratio. calculated by the citation counting and analysis, we can decide the rates of medical periodicals to books, foreign literature to domestic literature and literature of the most numerously cited. authors, for the selecting method of Korean Medical libraries. (1) It is disclosed that 61 main authors are cited 9 times. Most of them are Western authors, they are cited 14,374 times which represents 88.6 % of the total citations. (2) The cited medical literature is classified as follows: The ratio of cited medical periodicals to the cited medical books is 82.0%. (The books at a rate of 18.0%.) Therefore, the wnter concentrated the efforts on the analysis of periodicals. (3) Classification of the periodicals by countries indicates that about 11.2% of total citations are made from Korean medical literature. The medical activities in Korea are dependent on the advanced foreign countries at ratio of 88.8%. Of the foreign medical periodicals cited, Japanese literature represents only 4.5% while literature of European countries and America constitutes 84.3%. (4) If medical journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity of articles on a given subject, they may be revealed that it is necessary to have 98 titles of key journals to cover 60% of information in the field of medical science and 60 titles for an average of 50%. (5) For the purpose of measuring the life of medical literature in Korea, the writer has calculated the half lives of periodicals and books as follows: Kinds of Literature 1. Periodicals 2. Books 3. Whole literature Half-lives 7.75 years 4.11 years 6.37 years (6) The half lives of domestic and Japanese literature in the medical science are comparatively short.