Twenty-six years of LIS research focus and hot spots, 1990–2016: A co-word analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to map and analyse the conceptual and thematic structure of library and information science (LIS) research from the perspective of the co-word analysis. The bibliographical records consist of all the research papers published in the LIS core journals between 1990 and 2016 and indexed in Web of Science. ‘CiteSpace’ was used to visualise the co-word network of LIS studies. The frequency of co-occurrence and centrality scores in the overall structure of the field showed that the word ‘Science’ is the most significant and pivotal keyword among the nodes in the co-word network of LIS literature, and in this respect, the word ‘Library’ is in the second place. However, the results of the social network analysis uncovered that in spite of the high frequency of the word ‘library’, the pivotal role of the term has been exposed to decline over the time. The results of the analysis of co-word clusters showed that ‘information seeking and retrieval’ is the most important research focus in the intellectual structure of LIS literature during 1990–2016. Also, analysis of the hot spots of the LIS research based on Kleinberg algorithm indicated that the words ‘Internet’ and ‘World Wide Web’ have attracted the most attention by LIS scholars during the years under study.