A bibliometric study of literature on digital libraries
| Date | 12 June 2007 |
| Pages | 342-348 |
| Published date | 12 June 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710754841 |
| Author | Gian Singh,Rekha Mittal,Moin Ahmad |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
A bibliometric study of literature
on digital libraries
Gian Singh
Training and Translation Group,
National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources,
New Delhi, India
Rekha Mittal
National Science Digital Library Project,
National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources,
New Delhi, India, and
Moin Ahmad
Education, Training and Translation Group,
National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources,
New Delhi, India
Abstract
Purpose – The study has been undertaken with the purpose of finding out the growth and
characteristics of digital library literature.
Design/methodology/approach – Over 1,000 articles for the period 1998-2004 were collected from
LISA Plus and were analyzed to study authorship patterns, authors’ productivity and prominent
contributors, language-wise and year-wise distribution of articles, country-wise distribution of
journals, core journals in the subject area, and indexing term frequency.
Findings – Some of the important findings are that most articles (61 percent) are single-authored;
author productivity is not in agreement with Lotka’s Law, except in one case where number of articles
is three; the maximum number of articles were published in 2003 with English being the most
productive language; maximum articles were published in the journal D-lib Magazine; distribution of
articles nearly follows Bradford’s Law; and USA ranked first for maximum number of journals.
Originality/value – The paper is relevant to those interested in bibliometrics and provides a
comprehensive overview of authorship in the library and information science community.
Keywords Digital libraries,Literature, Bibliographies,Data analysis
Paper type General review
1. Introduction
Digital libraries began to be heard about in the early 1990s, as universities and other
institutions started to build discipline-based collections of information resources in
digital form. Access to these collections was being provided through local and wide
area networks. The emergence and development of the world wide web since 1993 has
allowed developers to provide universal access to digital libraries.
According to the Digital Library Federation:
Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff,
to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of,
and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily
and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities (Das and
Dutta, 2004).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
EL
25,3
342
Received 13 June 2006
Revised 17 August 2006
Accepted 23 August 2006
The Electronic Library
Vol. 25 No. 3, 2007
pp. 342-348
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/02640470710754841
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