The fit between journals and theses

The titles of a substantial sample of articles related to speech pathology and audiology over a period of 21 years were catalogued under one or more of 10 categories, e.g., normal audition, defective phonation, and the like. The titles of theses and dissertations in this field of six universities of Ohio over the same period were also catalogued. The articles appeared in 17 journals. The journals were treated as seven groups of "related" journals. The total output of journals was stable over the period studied; a "group" of journals tended to be consistent with itself over successive 3-year periods; the seven groups of journals tended to be unique, and not to replicate each other. The topics treated in the journals were accepted as a criterion for contemporaneousness. The student output of the universities varied in contemporaneousness from one school to another, ranging upward to r = 0.98 (10 categories). The overall correlation between the student and the journal outputs was r = 0.79.