Abstract
AbstractPrevious studies of research methods in Library and Information Science (LIS) lack consensus in how to define or classify research methods, and there have been no studies on automated recognition of research methods in the scientific literature of this field. This work begins to fill these gaps by studying how the scope of “research methods” in LIS has evolved, and the challenges in automatically identifying the usage of research methods in LIS literature. We collected 2,599 research articles from three LIS journals. Using a combination of content analysis and text mining methods, a sample of this collection is coded into 29 different concepts of research methods and is then used to test a rule-based automated method for identifying research methods reported in the scientific literature. We show that the LIS field is characterized by the use of an increasingly diverse range of methods, many of which originate outside the conventional boundaries of LIS. This implies increasing complexity in research methodology and suggests the need for a new approach towards classifying LIS research methods to capture the complex structure and relationships between different aspects of methods. Our automated method is the first of its kind in LIS, and sets an important reference for future research.
Highlights
Research methods are one of the defining intellectual characteristics of an academic discipline (Whitley, 2000)
Using a combination of content analysis and text mining methods, a sample of this collection is coded into 29 different concepts of research methods and is used to test a rule-based automated method for identifying research methods reported in the scientific literature
The field of Library and Information Science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary as we see a growing number of publications that draw on theory and methods from other subject areas
Summary
Research methods are one of the defining intellectual characteristics of an academic discipline (Whitley, 2000). LIS employs an increasingly diverse range of research methods as the discipline becomes increasingly entwined with other subjects, such as health informatics (e.g., Lustria, Kazmer et al, 2010), and computer science (e.g., Chen, Liu, & Ho, 2013). As a result of a wish to understand these patterns, a number of studies have been conducted to investigate the usage and evolution of research methods in LIS. Many of these (Bernhard, 1993; Blake, 1994; Chu, 2015; Järvelin & Vakkari, 1990) aim to develop a classification scheme of commonly used research methods in LIS, while some (Hider & Pymm, 2008; VanScoy & Fontana, 2016) focus on comparing the usage of certain methods (e.g., qualitative vs quantitative), or recent trends in the usage of certain methods (Fidel, 2008; Grankikov, Hong et al, 2020)
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