The Role of Practitioners in LIS Scholarship: A Case Study from the University of Maryland

Abstract

Librarians who practice bibliometrics are often asked to document the contribution of an academic department or research group to a larger body of scholarship. Here I explore techniques to address these requests with a case study examining Library and Information Science (LIS) scholarship at the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries. This analysis relied on bibliographic data from three sources:

- Work produced by librarians at the University of Maryland since 2008 collected from Google Scholar. - 8,924 records related to the “academic libraries” subject heading in EBSCO's Library and Information Science Source (LISS) database; and - The 5,000 most commonly used records in the “Information Science Library Science” research area in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection. Technologies used to access, analyze and visualize the records included the tm and bibliometrix packages in R, VOSViewer, and Gephi.

This study found that practitioner scholarship at the University of Maryland overlaps with much of the work in the larger field of LIS. A few topics in the broader collection LIS documents—reference services, access, and social media, for example—were not found in the UMD title analysis. Without a more careful documentation of the scope of each data source, however, it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions.