Research Trends in Library and Information Science: Analysis of ALIS and DJLIT

The study analyses the research articles published in two prestigious Indian LIS journals, Annals of Library and Information Studies (ALIS) and DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology (DJLIT) to identify the trend of research in the Library and Information Science from 2009 to 2013. Bibliographic information of published research articles has been collected from the journals directly, as the journals are open access (OA) in nature. Bibliometric tools and techniques have been employed to analyze the data.

The study shows that, the selected two OA LIS journals have published 457 research articles together during the study period (2009-2013) of which DJLIT published 280 (61.27%) research items followed by ALIS (177). The study revealed that the contemporary LIS researchers are concentrating on 22 research domains and these are Scientometrics (71), User study (55), Knowledge Organization (45), Bibliometrics (44), Webometrics (22), ICT application in Library (21), Digital library (20), IPR (19) and Information Retrieval (17), etc. Worthy to mention that, amongst the subject areas, scientometrics is leading with 15.53% of the total articles. The authorship pattern and citation analysis are found to be the core research areas in scientometrics. Research on visualization methods and scientific mapping have been emphasized by the community and becoming the core research areas of scientometrics.