Abstract:
The main purpose of this study is to determine the form, subject, time span, language, country of publications, and the type of cited documents. This study also aims at identifying the most cited journals from the 170 articles in five sub-subjects of social sciences: political science, economics, sociology, social psychology, and anthropology. The footnotes used in this citation analysis are totally of 2,365. This total comes from 52 social science journals published by Thai universities under The Office of Universities Affairs. They are Humanities and Social Science Journal, Thammasat University Journal, Thai Journal of Development Administration, Ramkhamhaeng University Journal, Journal of Social Science, Social Science Journal, Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities. These journals were published between 1981-1983. The results which are analysed and presented in percentage can be summarized as follows: It is found that books and journals of social science are the most cited forms as it is shown by 49.89 and 22.28 percent of the total citations. The citations are mostly related to the literature of political science, economics, and sociology. Concerning the date of cited documents, it is shown that the authors tended to cite the recent literature published within the past 5 and 10 years. In terms of language, the English documents makes up about 60.00 percent of the total citations. The Thai document account for about 38.01 percent and 1.99 percent cite other languages. The cited documents of 44.82 percent are published in Thailand and 33.66 percent in the United States. The most cited Thai journal of 223 journal citations is Thai Journal of Development Administration, where as Public Administration Review is mostly cited among other 304 English journals. The scope of the two journals are mostly of the political science. Since this study was conducted in the field of social science in only five sub-areas, and other studies of citation analysis should be in specifically in each subject of the social science in order to clarify the growth and structure of social science literature. Although the findings of this study represent the characteristics of the literature presumably used by one specific group of social science authors in five sub-subjects, but they can be implemented to the library development. Besides, the comparative study of the citation analysis and the actual library use, along with using other types of sources publications, i.e. monographs, theses, should receive further consideration. These studies will likely point out the effective and valid method of citation analysis.