Librarians must scrutinize collection development decisions to ensure that patron use of library materials meets expectations based upon institutional cost and effort to acquire, organize, and provide access to these materials. Some librarians have studied reference citation patterns within engineering as a tool for collection development. Because current commercial citation indexing tools focus on analysis by author and subject, gathering different types of citation information of interest to librarians can prove time-consuming. This paper presents a study that builds upon field-spanning and subfield-specific journal citation studies by Musser and Conkling and Musser, a study of theses and dissertations by Eckel, and in particular a study of civil engineering theses and dissertation citations by Kirkwood. Kirkwood analyzed citations by format of the cited material, finding that 40% of referenced sources in these theses and dissertations in civil engineering were grey literature, and noted that master's students cited grey literature almost twice as frequently as doctoral students at her institution. This paper seeks to establish whether format use within citations in the civil engineering literature differs appreciably from the patterns reported in earlier studies. In addition, the current study proposes a flexible data organization method that should allow for relatively straightforward re-use of the data in future, as yet undetermined, analyses.
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