Web citation behaviour in scholarly electronic journals in the field of library and information science

The modern era is facing a radical change in the way people find and use information resources. Although the information gathering and use pattern in the traditional print environment have been studied for many years, the electronic media presents a new and relatively unexplored area for such study. In this context, this article describes a citation analysis of research articles from scholarly electronic journals published in 2000-2006. The analysis focused on the extent to which scholars are using web-based sources in scholarly electronic journals. Results of the study shows that 81.49% of articles published in selected 9 electronic journals during 2000-2006 have web references. Out of 25,730 references 56.54 % of references are print journal references and 43.52% of them are web references. The majority of articles having web references are found in ARIADANE (93.24%) which ranks first, followed by Cybermetrics: International Journal of Scientometrics, Informetrics, and Bibliometrics (89.47%) and D-LIB Magazine (89.19%). It can be observed from the study that comparatively more number of articles (81.05%) published during the years 2000-2006 have web references.