Publication Patterns of U.S. Academic Librarians from 1998 to 2002

Abstract

This study examines the contributions of U.S. academic librarians to the peer-reviewed literature of library and information science (LIS). Compared to the authors’ study of thirty-two journals for 1993–1997, the present study finds that for 1998–2002, there were declines in the total number of refereed articles (almost 4%), number of refereed articles by academic librarians (almost 13%), proportion of refereed articles by academic librarians (just over 4%), proportion of academic librarian authors (almost 3%), and proportion of coauthored articles by academic librarians (almost 4%). Because different factors influence rates of authorship in a given set of journals and these rates tend to fluctuate in the short term, only further investigation can assess whether the declines are momentary or the start of a trend. Approximately 7 percent of academic librarians wrote three or more articles. The twenty most productive libraries published more than 10 percent of all refereed articles in the thirty-two journals and nearly one-third of the articles by academic librarians.

JAL in the Past Decade: A Comprehensive Analysis of Academic Library Research

“…Overall, academic librarians are making active contribution to scholarly communications -more than three-fourths of the JAL articles included at least one librarian author, which is much higher than findings from previous studies (Krausse & Sieburth;Watson, 1985, Weller, Hurd andWiberley, 1999;Wiberley, Hurd & Weller , 2006), where only 40 to 50% of LIS journal articles were authored by academic librarians.…”

“…They not only identified the authors' institutions, but also ranked individual authors based on their productivity. Two later studies conducted similar content analysis of LIS journals from 1993 to 1997, and from 1998 to 2002, respectively (Weller, Hurd and Wiberley, 1999;Wiberley, Hurd & Weller , 2006). In addition to determining the percentage of articles authored by academic librarians and their institutional affiliations, the studies also ascertained co-authorship patterns in terms of the number of coauthors and the type of collaborators (e.g.…”

Publish or Practice? An Examination of Librarians’ Contributions to Research

“…Documenting authorship of scholarly literature within a field allows researchers to assess "sources of strength in research and scholarship and the field's pace among other disciplines." 1 In library and information science (LIS), there is evidence of a trend of fewer librarian-authored research articles being contributed to the literature. 2 If this trend continues, the domain of LIS, as defined by its collective scholarly output, could look very different over the next two decades.…”

Library Faculty Publishing and Intellectual Property Issues: A Survey of Attitudes and Awareness

“…The most productive libraries are those in research "extensive" universities. 4 In the area of intellectual property rights, our literature review included copyright transfer agreements with a special focus on self-archiving. The literature review documented that in recent years most publishers have changed their copyright transfer policies to allow authors to retain more rights today than in the past, including the right to self-archive articles.…”