Knowledge Economy Core Journals: Identification through LISTA Database Analysis

BACKGROUND: Knowledge economy has become increasingly broad over the years and identification of core journals in this field can be useful for librarians in journal selection process and also for researchers to select their studies and finding Appropriate Journal for publishing their articles. Present research attempts to determine core journals of Knowledge Economy indexed in LISTA (Library and Information Science and Technology). METHODS: The research method was bibliometric and research population include the journals indexed in LISTA (From the start until the beginning of 2011) with at least one article a bout “knowledge economy”. For data collection, keywords about “knowledge economy”–were extracted from the literature in this area–have searched in LISTA by using title, keyword and abstract fields and also taking advantage of LISTA thesaurus. By using this search strategy, 1608 articles from 390 journals were retrieved. The retrieved records import in to the excel sheet and after that the journals were grouped and the Bradford’s coefficient was measured for each group. Finally the average of the Bradford’s coefficients were calculated and core journals with subject area of “Knowledge economy” were determined by using Bradford’s formula. FINDINGS: By using Bradford’s scattering law, 15 journals with the highest publication rates were identified as “Knowledge economy” core journals indexed in LISTA. In this list “Library and Information update” with 64 articles was at the top. “ASLIB Proceedings” and “Serials” with 51 and 40 articles are next in rank. Also 41 journals were identified as beyond core that “Library Hi Tech” with 20 articles was at the top. CONCLUSION: Increased importance of knowledge economy has led to growth of production of articles in this subject area. So the evaluation of journals for ranking these journals becomes a very challenging task for librarians and generating core journal list can provide a useful tool for journal selection and also quick and easy access to information. Core journal list and beyond core journal list obtained from this study can be used by librarians and researchers in this field.