LRRT announces winners of the Jesse H. Shera Award Distinguished Published Research for 2006

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For Immediate Release

August 22, 2006

LRRT announces winners of the Jesse H. Shera Award


Distinguished Published Research for 2006

CHICAGO - The Shera Award Committee of the American Library Association (ALA) Library Research Round Table (LRRT) has awarded the 2006 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research to "A Citation Study of the Characteristics of the Linguistics Literature" by Helen Georgas and John Cullars. This article appeared in
College and Research Libraries Vol. 66, No. 6 (November 2005): 496-515.

The Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research is given for a research article published in English during the calendar year, nominated by any member of LRRT or by the editors of research journals in the field of library and information studies.

By analyzing the citation patterns of the linguistics literature, the authors provide a bibliometric description of the discipline that will help librarians who have reference, instruction, or collection development responsibilities in this area understand it better. One important aspect of such an understanding is determining where linguistics classifies within the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences. Based on several of the citation patterns discovered, namely the importance of recent publications to the field, and the prominence of journals as a primary vehicle of scholarly communication, this analysis concludes that linguistics more closely resembles the disciplines of the social sciences.

Georgas is a coordinator of bibliographic instruction, University of Illinois at Chicago Library.
Cullars is a bibliographer for the humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago Library.

Jesse H. Shera, former dean of the school of library and information science at Case Western University, was known for his outstanding leadership in promoting the importance of research to the effective development of the theory and practice of library and information service.
He died in 1982, and LRRT established an endowment to support the award in 1987.