International transportation literature: an analysis of citation patterns, availability and research implications to the transportation community
Bonnie Anne Osif · International Journal on Grey Literature · 2000
Attention to infrastructure issues has increased in recent years. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) and its reauthorization in the Transportation Efficiency Act of 1998 (TEA 21) have focused stronger attention on the need to encourage innovation, identify and facilitate partnerships, identify core research and provide assessment criteria. This has resulted in increased awareness that information is key to accomplishing these goals. The importance of international materials is now seen as critical to efficient utilization of knowledge. Twelve European transportation centers in 9 countries were visited during 1998. Information was gathered on local characteristics of researchers, areas of research specialization, formats and languages of resources used/borrowed by the researchers, local publications and their dissemination patterns, the utilization of U.S. materials, and the role of the World Wide Web by the librarians, researchers and other staff at the transportation facility. In addition, a random sample of locally produced public reports was used to collect a sample of bibliographic references. These references provided a snapshot of the types of materials used by the local researchers. The references were coded by language, format of the resource and country of origin for reports. All references were searched in the OCLC database for availability in a collection in the U.S. or Canada. In addition, the number of locations was noted since an item in few locations is at risk of being lost or not being loaned. Several pertinent areas will be discussed. First, most European researchers are fluent in several languages, including English. However, the bibliographies tend to be strongly centered on the local language. Second, format type for items in the bibliographies is largely grey literature. The number of these items held in the U.S. and Canada is very low. Therefore, much of the grey material published in Europe is not readily available to the US researchers nor is the material that is cited in the papers. Studies indicate that the difficulties in obtaining international material have research implications. Third, the philosophical framework on information access is different than that in the US. There is a greater interest in generating income from the publications. This logically results in a less enthusiastic view of the World Wide Web and the link to full text free material that is gaining popularity in the US with the National Transportation Library. The findings of this study have implications in research, collection development and the growing digital movement. Several recommendations will be suggested.