Proceedings of the annual meetings of the association for information science and technology: analysis of two decades of published research
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-09-2021-0100 |
| Published date | 21 July 2022 |
| Date | 21 July 2022 |
| Pages | 105-120 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Library & information services,Lending,Document delivery,Collection building & management,Stock revision,Consortia |
| Author | Md. Anwarul Islam,Naresh Kumar Agarwal |
Proceedings of the annual meetings of the
association for information science and
technology: analysis of two decades of
published research
Md. Anwarul Islam
Department of Information Science and Library Management, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and
Naresh Kumar Agarwal
School of Library and Information Science, Simmons University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this study is to investigate the research and publication trends in the articles published in the conference proceedings of
the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) since the year 2000.
Design/methodology/approach –We analyzed two decades of ASIS&T proceedings to uncover bibliometric patterns. This study uses two
bibliometric procedures applied to the publications in the ASIS&T conference proceedings –a bibliometrics analysis using three data sources
(Scopus, ASIS&T proceedings website and Scimago journal ranking) and a scientific mapping analysis using VOSViewer.
Findings –We found 3,129 publications from 2000 to 2020, with more than three-quarters jointly authored. Most authors are from the United
States, Canada and China. Social media and information behavior are the top-researched areas. The top-cited journals are the Journal of the
Association for Information Science & Technology,Information Processing and Management and Library and Information Science Research.
Research limitations/implications –The study will help information professionals understand patterns in recent research, which should help guide
them in their future research directions.
Practical implications –The findings affirm ASIS&T’s move to an international association and point to the growing importance of collaborative
work and social media.
Originality/value –ASIS&T has been holding annual meetings since the 1950s. While there have been various bibliometric studies analyzing
publication trends in different journals in the field of information science, none of these studies have analyzed the ASIS&T conference proceedings.
Keywords Bibliometrics, ASIS&T, Conference proceedings, Geography, Distribution, Visualization
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In the academic and research world, conferences play an
important role by bringing researchers together and providing
opportunities for deep engagement. As compared to journals
where the research mightbe older by a year or more by the time
it gets published, conferencesprovide an avenue for the sharing
of the latest and cutting-edgeresearch and practice. In the field
of information science and technology, the annual meeting of
the Association for Information Science & Technology
(ASIS&T), an 84-year-oldassociation, is a premier conference,
bringing in researchersand practitioners from various countries
across the world. Heldlargely in North America since 1950, the
conference has expanded to global venuessuch as Europe and
Australia in the past few years. Being international and
multidisciplinary, the proceedings cater to the areas of
information science and technology, information behavior,
arts and humanities, classification, digital libraries,
education, health informatics, history, learning sciences,
ethics and policy, international issues, organizational
information, and knowledge management, metrics,
scientific and technical information, social informatics,
social media, visualization and artificial intelligence
(ASIS&T, 2021). An important avenue for library
and information science researchers, practitioners and
students, the ASIS&T proceedings are peer-reviewed and
indexed by SCOPUS (ASIS&T Proceedings, 2020).
The current issue and full text archiveof this journal is available on Emerald
Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2398-6247.htm
Information Discovery and Delivery
51/1 (2023) 105–120
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2398-6247]
[DOI 10.1108/IDD-09-2021-0100]
Anonymized sections: Lastly, the authors had earlier carried out a
bibliometric study of the JASIST (Agarwal and Islam, 2020). In future
work, we can compare the two studies to understand how the results differ
between the journal and the conference of ASIS&T.
A poster based on this paper was presented at the ASIS&T Annual
Meeting 2021 (Agarwal and Islam, 2021).
Received 17 September 2021
Revised 10 January 2022
7 March 2022
18 May 2022
Accepted 20 June 2022
105
2. Problem statement
There have been a number of bibliometricstudies of journals in
information science (Gurikar et al., 2018;Agarwal and Islam,
2020) or in the broader area of library and information science
(LIS), e.g., Tsay and Shu (2011),Ahmad et al. (2019) and
Joki
c (2020).Agarwal and Islam (2020) carried out a
bibliometricstudy of the Journal of the Association for Information
Science & Technology (JASIST). In a few studies, researchers
have also analyzed conference proceedings in different fields
related to LIS, e.g., Doraswamyand Janakiramaiah (2013) and
Shukla and Lalthlengliana (2019).Kim (2008) carried out a
citation flow analysis of ASIS&T proceedings using pathfinder
network analysis. Apart fromKim’s citation analysis more than
a decade ago, we found no systematic bibliometric study that
has analyzed the proceedingsof the ASIS&T annual meetings.
Our research question for the study is, “What are the
research and publication trends in the articles published in the
ASIS&T conference proceedings since the year 2000?”We
investigated the publication patterns using scientific mapping
analysis.
Analyzing the publications in the ASIS&T proceedings will
help new and established researchers understand the patterns
in what has been published in recent years in information
science and technology, what are the latest research areas and
how these could inform their research agendas and future
research directions.It would also be helpful for LIS researchers,
who may or may not be ASIS&T members, to know intimately
the type of research that the ASIS&T community engages in
and to determine if they would want to be a part of the research
community. Youngresearchers and graduate students planning
to submit their work to the ASIS&T annual meetingwill know
about the types of work that havebeen accepted and published
as part of full-length papers, short papers, posters and
panels, and decide on their submissions accordingly. The
bibliometric analysis will also shed lighton the overall flow and
direction of the field of information science, and if there have
been any major turns or shifts, for example, with the
ubiquitousness of smartphones and mobile information
behavior, or theprevalence of disinformation and fake news.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We briefly
review the literature. This is followedby the methodology. The
findings form the bulk of the paper,followed by discussion and
conclusions.
3. Literature review
3.1 Bibliometrics
Bibliometrics is one of theoldest research methods used in LIS
(Beck and Manuel, 2008), with bibliometric methods often
used to extract data based on content or citation analysis
(Wallin, 2005). Bibliographicdatabases, citation tools, citation
indices, statistical programs and visualization software have
broadened the scope of bibliometric analysis (Powell and
Connaway, 2004). Databases and computing technology have
made it easy for researchers in various fields of knowledge to
adopt bibliometrics (Beck and Manuel, 2008). In addition,
online access of journal articles, conference proceedings, email
discussion lists and other research documents has led to the
creation of new metrics for access and use (Thelwall, 2008).
While bibliometric analysis has been widely applied in the
quantitative analysis of written publications, it also has
implications for research evaluation (Herther, 2009).
Analyzing the bibliometricmethod using its own methodology,
Ellegaard and Wallin (2015) concluded that the number of
publications using bibliometric analysis as a tool for science
studies has been rising steadily in recent years, with
multidisciplinaryarticles shown to have the highest impact. We
summarize below some of the key bibliometric studies in the
LIS field, which focus on the analysis of journals, followed by
studies that havelooked at conference proceedings.
3.2 Bibliometric studies of LIS journals
There are a good number of bibliometric studies conductedin
the fields of information science and LIS during the past two
decades. Gonz
alez-Alcaide (2021) analyzed the growth in
bibliometric studies in different fields, apart from LIS. The
study analyzed articles published between 1965 and 2019 and
found that bibliometric research is published in
multidisciplinary journals. The article raises concerns about a
pattern of “uncontainable”growthwith papers published in the
last 15 years multiplying 12-found and spreading to all areas of
knowledge. Chaudhari and Pawar (2021) conducted a
bibliometricreview of studies focusing on the use, identification
and analysis of propaganda in social media. To examine this,
they imported data from the Scopus database from 2010 to
early 2020. The study found that social media is studied more
in the social sciences compared to computer science, with a
recent shift towards computer science. They found other
keywords, for example, fake news, terrorism and radicalization
that are studied in relationwith propaganda.
Some other bibliometric-relatedLIS studies are as follows: a
bibliometrics study of the Journal of the Association for
Information Science and Technology (Agarwal and Islam, 2020;
Mukherjee, 2009); productivity, visibility, authorship and
collaboration in LIS journals of central and eastern European
authors (Joki
c, 2020); a quantitative analysis of LIS
publications from the ISI Web of Science (Ahmadet al.,2019);
correlating research impact of LIS journals using citation
counts and altmetrics (Ezema and Ugwu, 2019); bibliometric
analysis of the Journal of Information Science (Gurikar et al.,
2018); and a bibliometric analysis of the Journal of
Documentation (Tsay and Shu,2011). In addition, bibliometric
studies also expanded from examining a single journal to a
group of journals, for example, Ma and Lee (2017) conducted
a bibliometric study of open access journals indexed in the
social science citationindex.
3.3 Bibliometric studies of LIS conferences
While there are a plethora of bibliometrics studies on
information science and LIS journals, very few studies have
focused on conference proceedings in information science and
LIS. The usage of such conference proceedings as a source of
bibliometric data is low. All the studies that we could find are
listed here. They are listed chronologically from 2006 to 2019
and their main findingsare briefly summarized.
Glänzel et al. (2006) found that applied and engineering
scientists publish more in conference proceedings than in
journals. Lisée et al. (2008) found that compared to other
scientific literature, the value of proceedings was falling over
time. However, the research citation of computer science
Association for information science and technology
Md. Anwarul Islam and Naresh Kumar Agarwal
Information Discovery and Delivery
Volume 51 · Number 1 · 2023 · 105–120
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