Suborganizations of Institutions in Library and Information Science Journals

Dalibor Fiala

doi:10.3390/info4040351

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze Web of Science data records of articles published from 1991 to 2010 in library and information science (LIS) journals. We focus on addresses of these articles’ authors and create citation and collaboration networks of departments which we define as the first suborganization of an institution. We present various rankings of departments (e.g., by citations, times cited, PageRank, publications, etc.) and highlight the most influential of them. The correlations between the individual departments are also shown. Furthermore, we visualize the most intense citation and collaboration relationships between “LIS” departments (many of which are not genuine LIS departments but merely affiliations of authors publishing in journals covered by the specific Web of Science category) and give examples of two basic research performance distributions across departments of the leading universities in the field.

Highlights

Introduction and Related WorkBibliometric studies can roughly be conducted at three levels—individual researchers, institutions, and countries
Vary significantly so ―Leiden Univ; Ctr Sci & Technol Studies‖ with 3722 citations and 84 publications is relatively more cited than ―Indiana Univ; Sch Lib & Informat Sci‖ with 4334 citations and publications (44 citations per publication compared to 18)
The measure of citations per publication is obviously biased towards departments with fewer publications

Summary

Introduction and Related Work

Bibliometric studies can roughly be conducted at three levels—individual researchers (micro-level), institutions (meso-level), and countries (macro-level). As for other regions of the world, Aina and Mooko [8] analyzed a small set of top African LIS researchers and defined the centers of the African LIS research Another tiny group of LIS publications was investigated by Herrero-Solana and Ríos-Gómez [9] to identify the most productive Latin American universities and departments. There have been two large-scale studies in which Yan and Sugimoto [12] explored citation patterns of various LIS institutions and He et al [13] explored tens of thousands of LIS publications, but both of them remained at the institutional level. This study is the only large-scale one at the departmental level and the visualization tools used in this article are discussed by Shannon et al [14]

Data and Methods

Results and Discussion

Conclusions and Future Work