Visibility of Reference Patterns in the Doctoral Theses of Engineering and Technology: A Citation Analysis Study

The visibility of reference patterns in Doctoral theses of Engineering and Technology awarded by the various general universities of Karnataka. The study consist of 17151 citations which have appeared in 137 Doctoral dissertations awarded during 1961–2008. Large number of citations ware traced during 1981 to 2000 awarded of doctoral dissertations. The distribution pattern of citation by type of documents i.e. journals are heavily cited (43.54%). It was observed that books fell in the next order (11.74%) followed by conference proceedings, reports, symposia papers representing 28.42 percent of the total which occupy an important place in usage. The average number of citations per thesis was 125.18. It is also noted that majority of citations patterns were traced in civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. Further the characteristics of references cited by the engineers and technologists in their Ph.D theses were studied. The results and discussions with regard to bibliographic form, language, country, subject, authorship pattern and frequencies of citations are presented in different tables and figure with some well known statistical and Bibliometric parameters have been applied for the study.