Forecasting the future of library and information science and its sub-fields

Abstract

Forecasting is one of the methods applied in many studies in the library and information science (LIS) field for numerous purposes, from making predictions of the next Nobel laureates to potential technological developments. This study sought to draw a picture for the future of the LIS field and its sub-fields by analysing 97 years of publication and citation patterns. The core Web of Science indexes were used as the data source, and 123,742 articles were examined in-depth for time series analysis. The social network analysis method was used for sub-field classification. The field was divided into four sub-fields: (1) librarianship and law librarianship, (2) health information in LIS, (3) scientometrics and information retrieval and (4) management and information systems. The results of the study show that the LIS sub-fields are completely different from each other in terms of their publication and citation patterns, and all the sub-fields have different dynamics. Furthermore, the number of publications, references and citations will increase significantly in the future. It is expected that more scholars will work together. The future subjects of the LIS field show astonishing diversity from fake news to predatory journals, open government, e-learning and electronic health records. However, the findings prove that publish or perish culture will shape the field. Therefore, it is important to go beyond numbers. It can only be achieved by understanding publication and citation patterns of the field and developing research policies accordingly.

Classifying papers into subfields using Abstracts, Titles, Keywords and KeyWords Plus through pattern detection and optimization procedures: An application in Physics

“…The same is true for the "Physics, Applied" WoSSC-which, for example, contains papers of Nuclear and Condensed, two other subfields with different research trends. That is, our classification results can provide better support for the calculation of normalized citation metrics within each subfield, an issue of growing interest in Scientometrics (Pech & Delgado, 2020, 2021; consequently, they provide more accurate and reliable academic performance evaluations of researchers and institutions-for financial, strategic or Human Resource management purposes.…”

Factors affecting time to publication in information science

“…While SCIM publishes 12 issues and almost 350 articles per year, the average number of articles for other journals are 156 for JASIST , 76 for JDOC , 75 for JOI , 73 for OIR and 45 for ASLIB . Also, the selected journals serve different sub-fields of information science (Taşkın, 2021a , 2021b ) and it makes the comparison difficult. To handle this problem, we provided statistics for each journal separately.…”

“…The codes were written using Python to get publications’ timeline data automatically from journal websites (Taşkın, 2021a , 2021b ). After getting the timeline data from journal websites, the publication time for each article was calculated.…”

“…Today, there is a publishing ecosystem that is growing much faster than anticipated. Many more publications are expected in the future (Taşkın, 2021a , 2021b ). Publish or perish culture encourages scientists to produce outputs as soon as possible rather than conducting meticulous research (Williams, 2021 ).…”

A bibliometric analysis of the scientific production related to “zero hunger” as a sustainable development goal: trends of the pacific alliance towards 2030

“…Otherwise, researchers and academics are key players in this context and government authorities should take actions and decisions based on the results and recommendations of its researchers to achieve the SDGs in coming years [3]. According to Taşkın et al [11], they indicated that the number of publications and citations will increase each year unless there is a change in research evaluation systems.…”