Mapping the literature of speech-language pathology.

The purpose of this study, part of the Medical Library Association (MLA) Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section's project to map the allied health literature, is to identify the core journals in the field of speech-language pathology and to identify indexing and abstracting services that provide access to these journals. Four representative speech-language pathology journals were selected and subjected to citation analysis to determine which journals were cited and how many times each was cited. Bradford's Law of Scattering was applied to the resulting list of journals to identify the core journals of this discipline. Six indexing and abstracting services were selected and scanned to determine coverage for the speech-language pathology core journals. The core journals received broad coverage in the health sciences and social sciences indexing and abstracting databases surveyed, although there was no one database that provided complete coverage of all core journals. The full Current Contents database provides the most extensive coverage of core journals. For individuals without access to the complete Current Contents database, a combined search of both MEDLINE and PsycINFO provides very comprehensive coverage of core journals.