Citing Patterns of Indian Space Technologists *

This paper probes into the publishing and citing patterns of engineers and technologists of ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore as part of a lager information-behaviour study; presents and analyses publishing productivity of Indian space technologists for over a decade, examines various channels/sources in which they preferred publishing and the channels cited by them. Apart from contrasting the publishing in and citing from Indian with foreign sources, frequency distribution of number of papers published and number of references cited including self citations for all the publications as well as a separate distribution for Journals as sources of publication and citation to journal articles are presented and discussed. The paper also examines availability of the channels/sources used by authors in the primary library and tries to relate ‘use’ in library to publishing and citing. The most popular journals as sources used by Indian space technologists are identified. The source papers and citations of the most productive authors among the group are checked in SCI and results reported. Paper concludes that unlike scientists, engineers and technologists, by their vary nature of work, are not much pressed by ‘publish or perish’ syndrome as only one fourth have ever published papers with an average of little over 2 papers per author. Even citations are not rich as 25% of papers had no citations. However, they had higher self citations than scientists in general and the channels used for citing were quite different from those used for publishing.