262
Russell C. Coile
Information Sources for Electrical and Electronics
Engineers
Russell C. Coile, Member, IEEE
Reprinted from IEEE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech,
Vol EWS-12, Number 3, October 1969, pp. 71-78
Abstract
Sources of information for electrical and electronics engineers have
been studied by looking at 1965 IEEE publications to see what periodicals,
books, conferences, etc., were cited. Cited journals have been ranked as
information sources by the number of times they were cited as references.
The data for 1965 have been compared with corresponding data for 1949
and 1934 to examine trends in volume and characteristics of reference
information, country of publication, and age of reference.
Introduction
The references in 1965 IEEE publications have been examined to
determine information sources used by IEEE authors. The IEEE publications
surveyed were the Proceedings and the 33 Group Transactions and Journals.
During 1965 there were a total of 22,235 references cited in these IEEE
publications. The references have been classifi ed as books, journals,
conferences, etc. (see Table I and Fig. 1).
Periodical Literature
There were 5,979 citations to 45 IEEE (including AIEE and IRE)
periodicals. Table II is a detailed list of IEEE sources. The 7,784 references
to periodicals other than IEEE involved 766 different journals. Table III lists
the 60 non-IEEE journals most frequently referenced in 1965, ranked by
number of citations.
Fig. 2 graphs distribution of citations among periodicals other than
those published by IEEE. Fifty percent of the references in 1965 cited
only 18 journals, 75 percent cited 73 journals, and 90 percent cited 238
journals of the total of 766. If a library desired general coverage (in addition
to that provided by IEEE publications) of at least 50 percent of the world's
electrical and electronic periodical literature, it would need at least these