Science & Technology Libraries: A Bibliometric Analysis from 1980 to 2020

Abstract

ABSTRACT Science & Technology Libraries (S&TL) is the prestigious LIS journal, providing a platform for LIS practitioners serving in the libraries related to science and technology disciplines. S&TL has an adequate history of publications spread over four decades. The data for this retrospective study were obtained from the Scopus database. All kinds of documents, published between 1980 and 2020 were collected to evaluate the bibliometric indicators, such as periodic growth of publications, citations, average annual growth rate, authorship pattern, most productive authors, institutions, and countries. An explicit fluctuation rather decreasing trend in the number of documents was observed. The highest number of documents was published in the first decade (1980–1989), while the lowest number was found in the last decade (2011–2020). The documents published during the third decade (2000–2010) gained the maximum citation impact. The majority of documents consisted of articles and single-author pattern dominated; however, the review paper and multi-author publications received more citations. More than one-fifth of the publications were contributed by the United States, and the 18 topmost contributing institutions also belonged to the United States. The analysis of the flow of knowledge reveals that more than 60% of the citations are considered as the country’s self-citation.