Library and Information Science

This article describes a study to investigate citation behavior in literary research and to clarify the characteristics of methodologies of the literary research by examining the citation behavior in detail.

1,946 references cited by 68 papers of Shakespeare study were randomly sampled, and examined in terms of following three items. These are, (1) indication of bibliographic description of cited works and papers, (2) proportion of citations to “works of Shakespeare” for all citations, (3) citation functions which are examined by classifying them into 6 categories (basic, subsidiary, additional information, perfunctory, partial negation, and total negation).

Main results of three items above are; (1) Bibliographic descriptions of most citations are clearly indicated but as to citations to “works of Shakespeare”, their bibliographic descriptions are sometimes omitted. (2) Citations to “works of Shakespeare” account for about 30 per cent of all citations, and remaining 70 per cent are citations to “papers by Shakespearian scholars”. (3) Of all citations to “papers by Shakespearian scholars”, about 45 per cent are “subsidary citations which are used to support ideas of citing paper authors, and “basic citations” to previous papers which are essential for the study in the citing papers are about 6 per cent.