Trends in Library Publishing

S. Craig Finlay, Chaoqun Ni, Andrew Tsou, and Cassidy R. Sugimoto, “Publish or Practice? An Examination of Librarians’ Contributions to Research,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 13:4 (2013): 403-321.

In recent years I’ve become very interested in library science research and publication, so this article in the current portal: Libraries and the Academy caught my attention. The authors analyzed over 4,000 articles in 20 top library and information science journals between 1956 and 2011. They looked at authorship; specifically whether the authors were practitioners, non-practitioners (in other words, teaching faculty), or a combination. They also looked at the topics of the papers published and their correlation with their status as practitioners or not.

They identified some trends in authorship, most notably that authorship by practitioners has declined somewhat since 2002. This is after a long period of steady increases in practitioner authorship, so the authors speculate that this may be an anomaly.

The authors analyzed the topics of published articles using a technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). I won’t even pretend to understand how this works, but the authors conclude from this analysis that the topics of papers differed somewhat depending on whether the author was a practitioner or not. There were three areas in which there was general overlap in topicality, and three that were different. What is notable is that articles authored by librarians focused more on library services whereas articles authored by non-practitioners focused more on use, retrieval, and informatics.

The authors conclude that if present trends continue with fewer articles published by practitioners, the observed differences in their research topics “would alter the content of the literature.” (p. 417) One issue they raise is whether librarians are sharing ideas more through the use of blogs?

It is interesting to note that of the 20 top-ranking journals in the library and information science field, there were journals with much higher percentages of librarian authors, and others with higher percentages of non-librarian authors. Those journals with the highest percentage of librarian authors included College & Research Libraries, Library Resources & Technical Services, Journal of Academic Librarianship, portal, Information Technology & Libraries, and Reference and User Services Quarterly. Those with the highest percentage of non-practitioner authors included: Information Processing & Management, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Information Science, Library & Information Science Research, and Journal of Documentation.

This research raises a number of questions for me. Are the journals attracting a particular kind of author; for example, is LRTS more attractive for practitioners, and is JASIST more attractive for non-practitioners? Or are the journals themselves causing this discrepancy because of their acceptance practices? Are there opportunities for aspiring researchers and authors to fill in some of these gaps?