Compare methods

	Citation Analysis for Collection Development	Reference Accuracy Study
Field	Library Information Science	Library Information Science
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	2017
Originator	Library collection-development literature; Jennifer E. Knievel & Charlene Kellsey (comparative humanities study)	Biomedical and library science literature on citation accuracy; Scott A. Mogull (synthesis)
Type	Bibliometric pipeline applying local citation patterns to collection-building decisions	Verification pipeline estimating bibliographic and quotation error rates in reference lists
Seminal source	Knievel, J. E., & Kellsey, C. (2005). Citation Analysis for Collection Development: A Comparative Study of Eight Humanities Fields. The Library Quarterly, 75(2), 142-168.	Mogull, S. A. (2017). Accuracy of cited "facts" in medical research articles: A review of study methodology and recalculation of quotation error rate. PLOS ONE, 12(9), e0184727.
Aliases	Local Citation Analysis, Citation-Based Collection Evaluation, Reference Citation Study, Citation Analysis for Acquisitions	Citation Error Analysis, Quotation Error Study, Reference Verification Study, Citation Accuracy Audit
Related	3	2
Summary	Citation analysis for collection development studies what a library's own community actually cites, in their theses, dissertations, and publications, and uses those patterns to guide what the library should buy, keep, and cancel. Rather than mapping the global structure of a field, it asks a local, practical question: which formats, languages, ages, and specific titles do our researchers rely on? By tabulating the references in locally produced scholarship, the method reveals, for example, whether a discipline depends on monographs or journals, how quickly its literature ages, and which journals or books appear most often, evidence that can be matched against holdings to find gaps and guide budgets. Knievel and Kellsey's comparative study of eight humanities fields showed how sharply these citation patterns vary by discipline, underscoring why collection decisions should rest on field-specific local evidence.	A reference accuracy study verifies the references in published work against their sources to estimate how often citations are wrong, distinguishing bibliographic errors (mistakes in author, title, year, volume, or pages) from quotation errors (cases where the cited source does not actually support the claim attributed to it). The method draws a sample of references, checks each one against the original document, and reports error rates as proportions with confidence intervals, often classifying errors by severity. Such studies have repeatedly found troubling rates: reviews of medical research, synthesized by Mogull (2017), put the quotation error rate near 14.5 percent, and Smith and Cumberledge (2020) found substantial quotation errors even in general science journals. For libraries and editors, these studies justify citation-checking services and reference-verification workflows.