The research literature of academic librarianship: A comparison of college & Research Libraries and Journal of Academic Librarianship

Abstract

College & Research Libraries (C&RL) and the Journal of Academic Librarianship (JAL) are the two primary journals in the field of academic librarianship. This study examines articles appearing in C&RL and JAL so as to evaluate these journals on the basis of type of articles published, structure of the articles, types of statistics used, and data collection methods used. The results indicate that C&RL publishes significantly more research articles than does JAL. Other results show that surveys are the primary form of data collection and that descriptive statistics are used much more frequently than inferential statistics. The percentage of research articles included in these journals has increased since earlier studies.