The Ratio of Conference Papers in Citations of Engineering Dissertations at Kyushu University.

Conference proceedings are important research resources, especially for researchers and graduate students in the science, technology, and medicine disciplines. For the development of comprehensive conference proceedings collections in academic libraries, we focused on three objectives: (1) identifying the number of items cited in doctoral dissertations, (2) examining the contents of each citation, and (3) determining the number of conference proceedings accessible from the Kyushu University library. We analyzed 148 dissertations produced by doctoral students at the faculty of engineering in Kyushu University, and 13,177 citations were classified on the basis of citation type, such as journal article, book, and conference proceeding. Among these citations, 1,458 (11.2%) were papers from conference proceedings. The conference proceedings available in the library were then examined to determine the number of items available in electronic format: 28.1% of the proceedings were available as printed materials, 9.0% could be accessed online, and 16.1% were available in both formats.