Who is who in library and information science research? The integrative application of scholarly influence indicators

Abstract

This research concerns determining authors’ scientific influence in library and information science research and their impact on the intellectual structure of the discipline by means of integrative indicators of the Scholarly Capital Model and co-authorship patterns. Research records comprised articles published from 1945 to 2016 in library and information science core journals and indexed in Web of Science. CiteSpace (software for visualization of scientific patterns and trends) was employed to map the intellectual structure of library and information science research based on co-authorship patterns. The results showed that the top 10 authors of library and information science research with the highest scores in terms of influence indicators (except for one person) were mostly concerned with the field of scientometrics which can be considered as the special impact of scientometric authors on the intellectual structure of library and information science research especially in recent years. Based on the results of the research, integrative use of scientometric indicators for measuring authors’ level of scholarly influence may grant a more precise perspective for decision makers in the field of library and information science.