The Role of Academic Libraries in Scholarly Communication. A Meta-Analysis of Research

Abstract

The wide expansion of digital technologies has influenced research in all fields of science as well as educational activities. Scientific objective: The purpose of this article is to examine critical areas of academic library activity, in a significant or requiring far-reaching changes in all aspects, in the context of needs of the scientific community. Research methods: It was decided that the method that will allow to outline the situation in this area will be qualitative content analysis texts from leading journals. For this purpose, the main databases of Web of Science articles have been searched: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), using the instruction TS = (“academic library” OR “academic libraries” OR “university library” OR “university libraries”) AND TS = (scholars or scientists or faculty or researchers or academics). The query limited to the last five years yielded gave as results 170 articles, of which 51 were deemed relevant to the issues discussed. Results and conclusions: In the light of qualitative content analysis of those texts, it is possible to distinguish following areas as important: general approach of scholars and librarians to cooperation, practices of research support, access to information resources adapted to scholars’ needs, data curation support, publication strategies support. On this basis, conclusions have been drawn about the role and type of support that academic libraries may provide in the process of scholarly communication. Cognitive value: This study has contributed to the research into the evaluation of academic library’s support services in the process of scholarly communication.