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This article reports the preliminary findings of a study on a scattering of journals and obsolescence based on 2-years' worth of empirical data obtained from a national document delivery service. The distribution of article requests to journal titles confirmed the findings of earlier studies. Heavily used core journal titles satisfied large numbers of document delivery requests while large numbers of infrequently used titles satisfied relatively fewer numbers of requests. Half the requests were made to articles of 8 years of age or younger. It takes slightly longer for core journal titles to get obsolete. The frequency of journal use for document delivery purposes was not related to ISI journal impact factors or citation half-lives, although a weak negative correlation was found between impact factors and citation half-lives. Median use age of journals was not related to impact factors either. A weak correlation was observed between frequency of use and total citation counts and between citation half-life and use half-life of core journals.

Scholarly communication in arts and humanities differs from that in the sciences. Arts and humanities scholars rely primarily on monographs as a medium of publication whereas scientists consider articles that appear in scholarly journals as the single most important publication outlet. The number of journal citation studies in arts and humanities is therefore limited. In this article, we investigate the bibliometric characteristics of 507 arts and humanities journal articles written by authors affiliated with Turkish institutions and indexed in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) between the years 1975–2003. Journal articles constituted more than 60% of all publications. One third of all contributions were published during the last 4 years (1999–2003) and appeared in 16 different journals. An overwhelming majority of contributions (91%) were written in English, and 83% of them had single authorship. Researchers based at Turkish universities produced 90% of all publications. Two thirds of references in publications were to monographs. The median age of all references was 12 years. Eighty percent of publications authored by Turkish arts and humanities scholars were not cited at all while the remaining 20% (or 99 publications) were cited 304 times (an average of three citations per publication). Self-citation ratio was 31%. Two thirds of the cited publications were cited for the first time within 2 years of their publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]