Investigating Women's Studies Core Journals: Librarians' Tools, Citations, and Speculations

Abstract

Having a list of "core" journals in a subject area can help librarians justify new subscriptions or protect highly regarded titles in tight budget times. Women's Studies is a broad interdisciplinary field that may effectively be resistant to the development of a core list, despite having customary librarians' tools for creating such core lists. Thomas and Younce have compared title lists from various standard sources, including the 2006 ISI Journal Citation Reports, the 2002 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Women's Studies Section core list, and titles indexed in a variety of Women's Studies indexes and databases, and collated those lists to arrive at a potential core journal list for Women's Studies. The purpose of this study is two-fold: to propose a current core list of journals for Women's Studies, and to examine the challenges of creating core lists.