Citation Analysis of AMS Journals for Collection Development and Publishing Decisions

In order to keep collections fresh within limited budgets, libraries can use journal bibliometrics to prioritize new and newly relevant journals to consider for their collections. Global bibliometrics on journals may also identify impacts of a journal within research fields, supporting author journal selection. American Meteorological Society (AMS) are among the most cited and well-known journals in meteorology and atmospheric science. In this study, citation analysis is used on AMS journals to identify the corpus of journals cited within AMS articles and those citing AMS articles. Further investigation identifies not only specific journals that are frequently cited by/citing AMS articles, but also examines the subject areas within the corpus to identify fields beyond meteorology and atmospheric science that are impacted by AMS articles. Time slice analysis identifies trends and changes in citation patterns. This appears to be the first study of its kind to globally analyze AMS journal citations. A discussion of the findings, methods used, and future research is presented. The results of this study will support meteorological science library collection development and author journal selection.