Webology, Volume 8, Number 1, June, 2011 |
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Akhtar Hussain
Web Librarian, College of Engineering-Civil Engineering Department, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Post Box 800, PIN 11421. E-mail: ahusain.c (at) ksu.edu.sa
Nishat Fatima
Senior Assistant Professor,
Department of Library and Information Science, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India. E-mail: nishat.zaidi (at) redifmail.com
Devendra Kumar
University Library/Department of Library and Information Science, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India. E-mail: dkdeobhu (at) gmail.com
Received May 5, 2011; Accepted June 24, 2011
This study aims to present a bibliometric analysis of the Electronic Library journal, the aim being to offer a summary of research activity in library and information science and characterize its most important aspects. The paper analyzes a bibliometric study of 578 articles were published during the period January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2010 in the Electronic Library journal. The paper covers the bibliometric analyses of year-wise distribution of articles, category-wise classification of papers, subject-wise distribution of articles, authorship patterns, and institutions-wise distribution of contributions. Special issues of the Electronic Library brought out during 2000-2010, and prolific authors during 2000 to 2010 have been analyzed.
Electronic Library; Bibliometrics; Content analysis; Scientific journal
Bibliometrics is a set of methods used to study or measure texts and information (Wikipedia, 2011). Bibliometric studies have been applied mainly to scientific fields and are based principally on various metadata elements like author, title, subject, citations, etc. related to scholarly publication within a discipline. This type of analysis provides useful indicators of scientific productivity, trends, the emphasis of research in various facets and researchers' preferences for publication (Jacobs, 2001). Sengupta has defined bibliometric as organization, classification and quantitative evaluation of publication pattern of macro-communication along with their authorships by mathematical and statistical calculations.
The term bibliometrics was first coined by Pritchard in 1969. An initiating example of a bibliometric study was statistical analysis of the literature of comparative anatomy from 1543 to 1860, done by including book and journal titles, and grouping them by countries of origin and periods. According to Hulme (1923) entitled "Statistical Analysis of the History of Science". His investigation was based on the entries in the English International Catalogue of Scientific Literature. Another third study was the work of Gross and Gross reported in 1927. They counted and analyze the citations in articles from the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and produced a list of journals estimates important to chemical education. Zipf's law (1949) relates to the frequency of word occurrence. Zipf derived his law from the empirical law of least effort. He said that there is relationship between the rank of the word and its frequency of textual matter, if the words are arranged in their decreasing order of frequency of occurrence in a long text. This law indicates that, "in a long textual matter if the words are arranged in their decreasing order of frequency then the rank of any given word of the text will be inversely comparative to the frequency of occurrence of the words". Another important work was Bradford's 1934 article on the distribution of literature in lubrication research. It is an important part of the theoretical foundation of bibliometrics, "Bradford's Law of Scattering".
In 1948, the Father of Indian library scientist, Dr. S.R. Ranganathan, coined the term "librametry", which historically appeared first and was intended to modernize the services of librarianship. Bibliometrics is analogous to Ranganathan's librametrics, the Russian concept scientometrics, informetrics, and subdisciplines like econometrics, psychometrics, sociometrics, biometrics, technometrics, chemometrics, and climetrics, where mathematics and statistics are applied to study and solve problems in their respective fields. Scientometrics is now used for the application of quantitative methods to the history of science and overlaps with bibliometrics to a considerable extent (Thanuskodi, 2010a).
The Electronic Library journal is devoted to the applications and implications of new technology, automation, digitization, the Internet, user interfaces, and networks in all types of libraries, information centers and museums throughout the world as well as the development of software and hardware for such applications. It provides a vehicle for the latest research and ongoing developments in today's digital library and information environments in different countries, and offers practical advice, useful information and descriptions of specific applications around the globe. It is published bimonthly, when it began to publish a continuous annual volume (Emeraldinsight, 2011). It is a highly regarded journal in the field of LIS, publishes mainly new research, and is known to receive a high number of citations (Bauer & Balkkalbasi, 2005).
This article reviews a few studies conducted abroad as well as in India on bibliometric study in chronological order.
Thanuskodi (2010b) discussed the research output performance of social scientists on social science subjects. The analysis cover mainly the number of articles, authorship pattern, subject wise distribution of articles, average number of references per articles, forms of documents cited, year wise distribution of cited journals etc. Yeoh and Kaur (2008) analyses the publication output of Research in Higher Education for subject support in collection development in the light of growing interest in diversified domains of research in higher education. Consequently, analysis of 40 issues of publications revealed a diversified usage pattern of bibliographic reference sources by contributing researchers, with a cumulative total of citations being 8,374. A positive trend in research collaboration of contributing authors, and a steady growth in the use of reference sources, periodicals and web documents in the citations signify the trend of scholarly communication of research works in the electronic age. Similar to other disciplines of research findings, journals and books were the most cited source materials for researchers thrash out.
Verma, Tamrakar and Sharma (2007) revealed that majority of the articles in the journal are two-authored and majority of the contributions are from New Delhi. Singh, Mittal and Ahmad (2006) conducted a bibliometric study of literature on digital libraries. 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 the 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. Tiew (2000) found that 53% of articles contained journal self-citations, and a tendency is noticed for authors affiliated to the institution publishing the journal to cite the journal. Patra, Bhattacharya and Verma (2006) analyzed the growth pattern, core journals and authors' distribution in the field of bibliometric using data from Library and Information Science Abstract (LISA) and found that the growth of literature does not show any definite pattern. Dhiman (2000) has done ten year bibliometric study Ethnobotany Journal published during 1989-1998. In this paper examines year-wise, institution-wise, country-wise, authorship pattern, range of references cited and length of the articles.
The objectives of the present study are:
The methodology applicable in the current study is bibliometric scrutiny, which is used to analyses in detail the bibliographic attributes of the articles published in the Electronic Library journal from 2000-2010. Eleven volumes (Vol. 18 to 28) containing sixty-six issues of the Electronic Library have been taken up for the study. The authors have extracted the information from the Electronic Library journal website published by Emerald Group of Publishing and then used MS Excel to organize, tabulate and analyze the data for the study.
The Electronic Library journal have extracted all the details such as author(s), title, year of publication, institutional affiliation, etc. of all articles published from 2000 to 2010 were recorded for the following analysis.
During the period January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2010, 578 articles were published. Table 1 show that the numbers differs from year to year and there is also steady increase in the number of articles from the year 2000 to 2010. Out of total 578 articles, the maximum numbers of articles are in the year 2009 contributing 71 articles, which are 12.28% to the total publications. The minimum numbers of articles are in the year 2000 with 31 articles, which are 5.36% to the total publications.
| No. of Articles Issue-wise | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Vol. No. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | No. of Articles | % |
| 2000 | 18 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 31 | 5.36 |
| 2001 | 19 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 33 | 5.7 |
| 2002 | 20 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 6 | 41 | 7.1 |
| 2003 | 21 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 51 | 8.82 |
| 2004 | 22 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 7 | 9 | 9 | 54 | 9.35 |
| 2005 | 23 | 11 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 10 | 9 | 63 | 10.89 |
| 2006 | 24 | 8 | 12 | 10 | 11 | 10 | 10 | 61 | 10.56 |
| 2007 | 25 | 8 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 12 | 55 | 9.52 |
| 2008 | 26 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 11 | 11 | 10 | 61 | 10.56 |
| 2009 | 27 | 12 | 13 | 13 | 12 | 11 | 10 | 71 | 12.28 |
| 2010 | 28 | 12 | 10 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 8 | 57 | 9.86 |
| Total | 11 | 94 | 99 | 97 | 97 | 97 | 94 | 578 | 100 |
Table 2 focuses that the category wise classification of the papers published during period from 2000 to 2010. The study reveals that the maximum number of articles published as under the category of research paper i.e. 236 (40.83%), whereas 133 (23.01%) articles published under the case study category. There were a small numbers of articles published as under the literature review category, i.e., 22 (3.81%). Thus, it clearly shows that 40.83% of the users are regular visitors of the Library, while the remaining 9.17% are not regular visitors of the library.
| Year | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | No. of Articles | % |
| Research paper | 1 | 6 | 8 | 24 | 16 | 20 | 8 | 30 | 29 | 43 | 41 | 236 | 40.83 |
| Technical paper | 1 | 9 | 9 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 29 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 70 | 12.11 |
| Conceptual paper | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 19 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 33 | 5.71 |
| Viewpoint | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 10 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 19 | 3.28 |
| Case study | 1 | 10 | 14 | 18 | 5 | 12 | 10 | 11 | 19 | 15 | 8 | 133 | 23.01 |
| Literature review | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 22 | 3.81 |
| General review | 8 | 5 | 8 | 8 | 5 | 13 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 65 | 11.25 |
| Total | 3 | 33 | 41 | 51 | 54 | 63 | 61 | 55 | 61 | 71 | 57 | 578 | 100 |
The particulars of subject-wise analysis of articles are shown in the Table 3. Table shows that a majority of a contributions appeared under library and Internet 141 (24.39%).The next position is taken by digital library 89 (15.40%). This is followed by electronic resources 71 (12.29%) and academic library 65 (11.25%).Further followed by information services and others subject 54 (9.34%) have contributed by various authors in the Electronic Library journal. There are small numbers of contributions shows in the subject like library automation, library profession, public library, special library and RFID application in library and information centers.
| Year | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | No. of Articles | % |
| Electronic Resources | 5 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 11 | 9 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 71 | 12.29 |
| Library Automation | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 7 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 33 | 5.70 |
| Library and Internet | 3 | 16 | 19 | 13 | 18 | 15 | 10 | 9 | 17 | 10 | 11 | 141 | 24.39 |
| Library Profession | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 20 | 3.46 |
| Digital Libraries | 10 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 10 | 16 | 6 | 89 | 15.40 |
| Academic Libraries | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 12 | 11 | 65 | 11.25 |
| Public Libraries | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 12 | 2.07 |
| Special Libraries | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 1.04 |
| OPACs | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 26 | 4.50 |
| RFID Applications | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 1.22 |
| Information Services | 3 | 3 | 4 | 10 | 2 | 2 | 6 | 8 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 54 | 9.34 |
| Others | 3 | 0 | 4 | 10 | 4 | 6 | 7 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 4 | 54 | 9.34 |
| Total | 31 | 33 | 41 | 51 | 54 | 63 | 61 | 55 | 61 | 71 | 57 | 578 | 100 |
The authorship pattern was analyzed to determine the percentage of single and multiple authorship. As Harsanyi (1993) has shown, different disciplines interpret the order of authorship differently. According to Terry (1996), there are no established norms for citation order in librarianship and information science. As indicated in Table 2, our author sample consists of 2153 authors for 975 articles.
Table 4 reveals that during 2000-2010 the highest proportion of articles were by single authors (46.54%), followed by articles with 2 authors (32.87%), 3 authors (15.40%), and 4 or more authors (5.19%). The data point out that the large number of articles by single authors means that there are no well-established research groups in the area and the subject is a new and emerging one. Chen and Chen (2005) have also found that in the area of metadata research in library and information science maximum papers are published by single authors.
| Year | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Authorship | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | No. of Articles | % of Articles | Total Authors |
| Single | 16 | 18 | 20 | 34 | 33 | 41 | 29 | 25 | 22 | 13 | 18 | 269 | 46.54 | 269 |
| 2 authors | 11 | 13 | 11 | 10 | 14 | 14 | 13 | 21 | 27 | 32 | 24 | 190 | 32.87 | 380 |
| 3 authors | 4 | 2 | 7 | 6 | 3 | 8 | 17 | 7 | 6 | 18 | 11 | 89 | 15.4 | 267 |
| 4 authors | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 22 | 3.81 | 88 |
| 5 authors | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 0.69 | 20 |
| 6 authors | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 0.52 | 18 |
| 7 authors | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0.17 | 7 |
| Total articles | 31 | 33 | 41 | 51 | 54 | 63 | 61 | 55 | 61 | 71 | 57 | 578 | 100 | -- |
| Total authors | 50 | 50 | 76 | 76 | 89 | 93 | 116 | 96 | 118 | 170 | 115 | -- | -- | 1049 |
| Average authors per article | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1.9 | 2 | 1.9 | 2.4 | 2 | |||
| Single % | 52 | 55 | 49 | 67 | 61 | 65 | 48 | 45 | 36 | 18 | 32 | |||
| Joint % | 48 | 45 | 51 | 33 | 39 | 35 | 52 | 55 | 64 | 82 | 68 | |||
To determine degree of collaboration in quantitative terms, the formula given by K. Subramanyam (1983) was used.
|
The formula is Where C = Degree of collaboration NM = Number of multi authored papers NS = Number of single authored papers |
C = | NM NM + NS |
| |
C = | 269 269 + 780 |
| In the present study the value of C is | C = | 0.256 |
As a result, the degree of collaboration in the Electronic Library journal is 0.256, which clearly indicates its dominance upon individual contribution.
Table 5 shows institution-wise distribution of papers published in the Electronic Library journal during the period under study. Authors from universities and academic institutions contributed 417 (72.15%) papers followed by 76 (13.15%) from research institutions. Authors from others, i.e., private research institutions, information centers etc. and colleges comprised 10.90% and 3.80% respectively.
| Years | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Institutions | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | No. of Articles | % |
| Universities | 21 | 21 | 31 | 31 | 36 | 43 | 42 | 40 | 46 | 58 | 48 | 417 | 72.15 |
| Colleges | 1 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 22 | 3.80 |
| Research Institutions | 4 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 9 | 12 | 9 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 76 | 13.15 |
| Others | 5 | 2 | 4 | 13 | 8 | 5 | 7 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 63 | 10.90 |
| Total | 31 | 33 | 41 | 51 | 54 | 63 | 61 | 55 | 61 | 71 | 57 | 578 | 100 |
Table 6 shows the details of special/thematic issues of the Electronic Library journal brought out during 2000-2010 under the Guest Editorship of eminent LIS professionals both from academia as well as research and development organizations/institutions. Out of 66 issues published during 2000-2010, only fifteen special issues were brought out. There were no special issues were brought out during 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2010. But in the later part of decade, i.e., 2002 onwards, the journal has published a number of thematic issues quite regularly except 2006 and 2010.
| Year | Volume & Issue No. | Theme/Title | Guest Editor(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2002 | Vol. 20 No.4 | Electronic books for teaching and learning | Dr. Monica Landoni and Pro. Ignacio Aedo |
| 2003 | Vol. 21 No.3 | Libraries in the twenty-first century | Dr. David Raitt |
| Vol. 21 No. 5 | The impact of IT on indigenous people | Dr. Loriene Roy and Dr. David Raitt | |
| 2004 | Vol. 22 No. 1 | Network and security issues | Dr. David Raitt |
| Vol. 22 No. 6 | Oceans of opportunity: Whakawhitihiate Moana | Dr. David Raitt | |
| 2005 | Vol. 23 No. 1 | Electronic books | Dr. David Raitt |
| Vol. 23 No. 3 | ICT developments in Nigerian libraries | Dr. David Raitt | |
| Vol. 23 No. 5 | Issues from multimedia gaming technology | Dr. David Raitt | |
| 2007 | Vol. 25 No. 2 | Metadata and semantics for digital libraries | Dr. David Raitt |
| Vol. 25 No. 4 | Papers from the ALIA 2006 Conference | Dr. David Raitt | |
| Vol. 25 No. 5 | WWW applications in South Africa | Dr. David Raitt | |
| 2008 | Vol. 26 No. 3 | Artificial intelligence applications in digital content | Dr. David Raitt |
| Vol. 26 No. 5 | LIANZA 2007 | Dr. David Raitt | |
| 2009 | Vol. 27 No. 2 | Ubiquitous digital library and innovative community | Dr. David Raitt |
| Vol. 27 No. 5 | Special sections on MTSR 2007 and ALIA 2008 | Dr. David Raitt |
It was observed that there are a total of 1038 of contributors for 578 articles Stephen M. Mutula and Howard Falk have contributed eight articles and seven articles each; Shien-Chiang Yu has contributed six articles, whereas 4 authors have contribution of five articles each. The data showed that authors contributions of 3 and 4 times contributed 139 articles, while authors have 1 and 2 times contributed 869 articles, which have published in the Electronic Library journal during 2000 to 2010.
The publishing trend totally depends on the output of contributors, patterns of contributions and the quality of research. The year 2009 shows the maximum number of contributions to the Electronic Library journal. This study reveals that the categories of article distributions are remarkable in this research journal. The majority of the articles were contributed by single authors; and most authors were librarians, faculty members or researchers affiliated with academic or research institutions. Out of 66 issues published during 2000-2010, only fifteen special issues were brought out from eminent editors and guest editor of LIS professionals. It is registered that Stephen M. Mutula, Howard Falk, and Shien-Chiang Yu were most proliferate authors who have contributed eight articles, seven articles and six articles each. The Electronic Library is notably a scholarly journal that stipulates or induces fruitful research for the library and information profession.