Investigating country-focused studies in Library and Information Science journals

Abstract

A country-focused study can be defined as a type of study in which the article’s topic is limited to a particular country. Based on the assumption that a country-focused article contains one or more country names in the title or keywords (CNtk), the objective of this study was to investigate the characteristics of country-focused articles in Library and Information Science (LIS) journals. For this study, we selected 30 journals from the Scimago Journal Rank with the highest h-index scores to empirically investigate LIS articles with CNtk. The respective bibliographic records of these journals from 2010 to 2020 were downloaded from Scopus. In terms of subject categories, journals that addressed scientific and technical topics published fewer country-focused articles. In contrast, those on culture, society and government published a higher number of country-focused articles. One exception to this generalisation is that country-focused studies were found to be highly prevalent in certain technical subjects, such as bibliometrics. Although additional empirical evidence is needed for other fields of study, the proposed method seems valuable in analysing journal characteristics since it provides country-specific information about the published articles.