A citation study of public health Masters' theses

The purpose of this paper is to devise methodologies and attain results that would allow the author to evaluate local collections that support public health users.

The largest available source of data was local Masters' student theses. The methodology is a case study employing citation analysis of Masters' theses.

The study provided a list of the journals most used by Masters' students in their theses to be compared to currently subscribed titles to evaluate local holdings. It confirmed that ISI journal rankings were not a useful tool for local collection building.

The study provides a methodology for evaluating and improving the local journal collection and could be combined with further studies to create a core list of public health journals locally. It also provides guidance on types of resources to buy and confirmed the importance of journals to the collection. The study could be combined with similar studies at other institutions to create a broad‐based core journal list.