authors read national literatures?

[Gretchen Whitney]

greetings all,

 I have a vague recollection that a study (or studies) reported, perhaps
by analysis of lists of references in documents, that scientists primarily
read their national literatures, and did not stray frequently into the
literatures of other countries.
 Is there any evidence of this?  Does this sound familiar to anyone?  What
might I have read?  This could be as old as some studies out of psychology
in the 1970s.
 I'm doing a study of a subset of MEDLINE through DIALOG, and I'd like to
be able to assert that the values in the CP (country of publication) field
reflect what scientists in a given country READ, and the values in the CS
(author affiliation) field reflect what they experiment with and WRITE.
By analysis of these fields and titles/subjects, this assertion seems to
be supported because there is consitency in values regarding therapies
explored/supported/promoted from both fields.

In other words, there is consistency in both that enable me to assert that
country x is exploring y therapy, as opposed to country w exploring z
therapy.

Is there literature out there that supports the idea that scientists,
particularly physicians, read their national literatures predominantly,
and write in those intellectual domains?

I've already tried Tenopir/King, and it wasn't them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  --gw

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Gretchen Whitney, PhD                                     tel 865.974.7919
School of Information Sciences                            fax 865.974.4967
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA           gwhitney at utk.edu
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
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