Citation analysis in the literature of tropical medicine.

A brief historical account of tropical medicine as a science is given, followed by a short survey of the development of the literature in the field. The citations indexed in Tropical Diseases Bulletin for a forty-eight-month period (1972-1975) were analyzed according to the journal in which they were published and the language in which they appeared. The results of the study conformed to Bradford's law of bibliographic distribution. The reference scattering coefficient was determined to be 0.504, which indicated a high concentration of articles in relatively few journal titles. A rank order list of sixty-one journal titles is given in an appendix. The study showed English to be the most important language in the literature in terms of productivity. The results of the study may be used as an acquisition tool for developing a journal collection in tropical medicine.