Citation Analysis of Masters’ Theses in Computer Science to Support Collection Development at the University of Ilorin Library

This study focused on citation analysis of masters' theses in Computer Science submitted to the University of Ilorin Library, Kwara State between 2008 and 2014.Normative Law of Citation (1972), Garfield's Law of Concentration (1971) and Bradford's Law of Scattering (1934) provided the theoretical framework.The population comprised all masters' theses in Computer Science available at the University of Ilorin Library and was ninety-one (91) in number while the total enumeration sampling technique was used to determine the sample size.The study used a quantitative method of research design and adopted the total enumeration sampling technique for data collection.Three (3) document extraction templates that covered items relating to the study objectives were designed and used to collect data from twenty (20) copies of masters' theses in the library.The study identified the subject areas of the theses' titles, chronological distributions of the cited references, and the collaboration patterns of cited journals.The findings revealed that the titles have an intersection with other fields of knowledge while the findings on the chronological distribution of cited references revealed recency of cited documents as documents published between 2011-2014 were mostly referenced with a total number of 1138 representing 38.0 percent and 2006-2010 with 625(20.9%).It was observed that at the time of citation of cited references, the documents were current and relevant to the topic of the study.The findings on the collaboration patterns of cited journals showed that 531 journals representing (63.7%) were multidisciplinary.