LIS research across 50 years: content analysis of journal articles
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-03-2021-0062 |
| Published date | 15 July 2021 |
| Date | 15 July 2021 |
| Pages | 65-88 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Kalervo Järvelin,Pertti Vakkari |
LIS research across 50 years:
content analysis of journal articles
Kalervo J€
arvelin and Pertti Vakkari
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences,
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Abstract
Purpose –This paper analyses the research in Library and Information Science (LIS) and reports on (1) the
status of LIS research in 2015 and (2) on the evolution of LIS research longitudinally from 1965 to 2015.
Design/methodology/approach –The study employs a quantitative intellectual content analysis of articles
published in 30þscholarly LIS journals, following the design by Tuomaala et al. (2014). In the content analysis,
we classify articles along eight dimensions covering topical content and methodology.
Findings –The topical findings indicate that the earlier strong LIS emphasis on L&I services has declined
notably, while scientific and professional communication has become the most popular topic. Information
storage and retrieval has given up its earlier strong position towards the end of the years analyzed. Individuals
are increasingly the units of observation. End-user’s and developer’s viewpoints have strengthened at the cost
of intermediaries’viewpoint. LIS research is methodologi cally increasingly scatter ed since survey,
scientometric methods, experiment, case studies and qualitative studies have all gained in popularity.
Consequently, LIS may have become more versatile in the analysis of its research objects during the years
analyzed.
Originality/value –Among quantitative intellectual content analyses of LIS research, the study is unique in
its scope: length of analysis period (50 years), width (8 dimensions covering topical content and methodology)
and depth (the annual batch of 30þscholarly journals).
Keywords Content analysis, Statistical analysis, Information science, Library and information science,
Longitudinal study, Scholarly journal articles
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Severalstudies indicate that(Library and) InformationScience (LIS) is underreorientation both
topically and methodologically (Hsiaoand Chen, 2020;Ma and Lund, 2020). Pressurestoward
this are due to developments in underlyingtechnologies of disseminationof information and in
the correspondingresearch areas like digital libraries, data mining, machinelearning and web
science, among others. It is timely to investigate how these pressures materialize in the
published LIS research.
To understand the state of a discipline, and consciously build its possible futures, it is
necessaryto know how the characteristicsof its research have developedto date. This requires
analysis of the development of research foci and methodological choices. Understanding the
current state also helps planning the curricula and research. For the former one learns what
courses are necessary, which strategically desirable, which minors are most useful and from
whereto recruit students and teachers.For research planning,one gains a mapping of theactive
research areas andhints for building successful alliances.
When building such understanding, past literature has analyzed research topics and
methods in LIS (e.g.
Astr€
om, 2007;Tuomaala et al., 2014). The present paper reports a
content analysis of articles published in top scholarly journals of LIS, following the study
LIS research
across 50 years
65
© Kalervo J€
arvelin and Pertti Vakkari. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is
published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce,
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 19 March 2021
Revised 4 June 2021
Accepted 6 June 2021
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 7, 2022
pp. 65-88
Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-03-2021-0062
design by Tuomaala et al. (2014) and covering research from 1965 to 2015 at 20 years’
intervals.
The paper has two research questions (RQs): (1) What was the topical and methodological
state of LIS research in 2015? We analyze this through articles published in core LIS journals
in 2015. (2) How has LIS evolved from 1965 to 2015? We examine this in the light of
comparable statistics for the years 1965, 1985 and 2005 and 2015, reporting on the rise and fall
of LIS research foci and methodological choices.
Our dataset comes from scholarly English language LIS journals. Journal articles have
been almost the sole data source in recent studies of LIS research publications (e.g. Milojevic
et al., 2011;Figuerola et al., 2017;Han, 2020). We analyze the trends in LIS research over 50
years. The period covered is notably longer than in earlier studies, which typically cover
about 20 years (e.g. Hou et al., 2018;Han, 2020), at most 36 years (Figuerola et al., 2017). To
enhance comparability of findings with Tuomaala et al. (2014) we tried to keep the set of LIS
journals stable over the years.
By following Tuomaala et al. (2014) we also adopted their criteria in journal selection.
Their theoretically oriented criteria meant purposive selection of core journals matching the
characterization of LIS as the provision of access to desired information (Vakkari, 1994). We
have therefore avoided inclusion of journals belonging to other disciplines, like management
information systems, as suggested by Abritzah et al. (2015) and Huang et al. (2019). Their
practical criteria meant foc using on scholarly LIS journal s with wide distribution,
international editorial board and publication policy –which had been assessed as core
journals by other researchers (e.g. by Peritz, 1980;Tuomaala et al., 2014). We arrived at a set of
30þjournals for collecting an article set of 1,514 articles.
To construct the dataset for analysis, we performed a quantitative intellectual content
analysis, classifying articles along eight dimensions covering their topical content and
methodology. Our LIS classification is based on Tuomaala et al. (2014) and provides a tool for
organizing and interpreting findings without an atheoretical selection and naming of topical
clusters to represent LIS quite typical in scientometric analyses. In addition to the topical
developments, we report on methodological developments of LIS during 50 years. Intellectual
content analysis is appropriate in separating topical and methodological aspects. For
example, it becomes natural to classify an article that topically belongs to scientometrics but
employs a mathematical research strategy (non-empirical), and another topically in
scientometrics but employs citation analysis (an empirical strategy).
2. Literature review
There are no recent major conceptual analyses of LIS like in earlier years (c.f. Tuomaala et al.,
2014), while there are empirical ones. Most of these studies have applied scientometric
research strategies, and only a few have used content analysis. Next, we will present studies
which have analyzed LIS research after 2014.
2.1 Research topics
Ma and Lund (2020) is the only study using content analysis to explore the evolution of
LIS. They analyzed the topics and methods of scholarly articles in 31 major LIS journals in
2006, 2012 and 2018, using categorizations of Tuomaala et al. (2014). The findings
indicated a shift of emphasis toward scholarly communication and information seeking
topics, along with a reduction of the share of information storage and retrieval (IS&R) and
L&I service topics. In 2018 IS&R was the most common research topic followed by
scholarly communication.
Chang et al. (2015) analyzed the evolution of LIS based on keywords, bibliographical
coupling and co-citation analyses during four five-year periods between 1995 and 2014. Data
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