Mapping the Canadian library and information science research landscape

Cora-Lynn Munroe-Lynds,Emily Mcclean,Philippe Mongeon,Marc-André Simard,Vinson Li

doi:10.29173/cais1221

Abstract

This work-in-progress paper aims to map the scholarship produced by the eight Canadian Library and Information Science (LIS) schools. After using the citation network to divide publications into several research areas, we analyze how the research output of different LIS schools is distributed across these areas, in an attempt to shed light on the schools’ specificities and commonalities and how each school contributes to the global picture of Canadian LIS research.

Highlights

Information Science has been defined by Borko (1968) as “a discipline that investigates the properties and behaviour of information” concerned with the “origination, collection, organization, storage, retrieval, interpretation, transmission, transformation, and utilization of information”
Empirical investigations of Library and Information Science (LIS) have highlighted its multidisciplinary nature (Aharony, 2012; Chua & Yang, 2008; Onyancha, 2018; Paul-Hus et al, 2016), as well as the gradual shift of the field’s focus from libraries to a more diverse range of topics such as information technologies, knowledge management, and bibliometrics (Chua & Yang, 2008; Figuerola et al, 2017; Larivière et al, 2012; Ma & Lund, 2020; Onyancha, 2018). yet these previous studies all suffer from the same limitation: despite acknowledging the multidisciplinary nature of the field, they tend to ignore the differences in publication practices that characterize the disciplines composing the field and the potential biases that may result from these differences
Adopting an affiliation-based approach to mitigate these limitations, this work-in-progress delves into the composition of the Canadian LIS research landscape and highlights the specific role played by individual schools within it

Summary

Introduction

Information Science has been defined by Borko (1968) as “a discipline that investigates the properties and behaviour of information” concerned with the “origination, collection, organization, storage, retrieval, interpretation, transmission, transformation, and utilization of information”. These previous studies all suffer from the same limitation: despite acknowledging the multidisciplinary nature of the field, they tend to ignore the differences in publication practices that characterize the disciplines composing the field and the potential biases that may result from these differences. They often use journal classifications to delineate the field, which can lead to both the inclusion of non-LIS articles published in multidisciplinary journals and the exclusion of LIS research published in non-LIS journals.

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Conclusion