Authors’ sources of information: a new dimension in information scattering

The purpose of this study is to determine the usage patterns of core journals by scholars, and to address the differences among various academic disciplines. Thus, the references of 11,230 corresponding authors for the past 35 years from the world’s top five highly cited universities and institutions were analyzed. To build robust models of information scattering, we need a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The results show that core journals usage is a social phenomenon, in exactly the same way as Bradford’s law, Zipf’s law and Lotka’s law. The analysis of author references shows that if core scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity, then they could be divided into a small group of highly cited periodicals and a large group of minimally cited ones. Scholars may do browsing and similar information-seeking activities to form their core journals, and the findings may support Bates’s hypothesis that Bradford’s core zone is best searched by browsing. Bradford’s law and relevant research may consequently help to solve many of the practical problems that practitioners of the profession face, particularly in collection development in libraries, and help users to gather highly scattered information.