The paper analyses Library and Information Science (LIS) articles published in leading international LIS journals based on their authors’ disciplinary backgrounds. The study combines content analysis ...of articles with authors’ affiliation analysis. The main research question is: Are authors’ disciplinary backgrounds associated with choice of research topics and methods in LIS articles? The study employs a quantitative content analysis of articles published in 30 + scholarly LIS journals in 2015, focusing on research topics and methods. The articles are also assigned to three disciplinary categories based on authors’ affiliations: External (no authors from LIS institutions), Internal (all authors from LIS institutions), and Mixed (some authors from LIS institutions, some from outside). The association of articles’ disciplinary categories with article research topics and methods is analysed quantitatively. Most research contributions to LIS come from external articles (57%). However, LIS scholars have a clear majority in research on L&I services and institutions (68%), while external scholars dominate the contributions in Information retrieval (73%) and Scientific communication (Scientometrics, 69%). Internal articles tend to have an intermediary’s (29%) or end-user’s (22%) viewpoint on information dissemination while the external ones have developer’s viewpoint (27%) or no dissemination viewpoint (49%). Among research strategies, survey (29%) and concept analysis (23%) dominate internal articles, survey (28%) and citation analysis (19%) dominate mixed articles, and survey (20%) and citation analysis (19%) dominate external articles. The application profiles of research strategies varied somewhat between disciplinary categories and main topics. Consequently, the development of LIS in the areas of Information retrieval, Information seeking, and Scientific communication seems highly dependent on the contribution of other disciplines. As a small discipline, LIS may have difficulties in responding to the challenges of other disciplines interested in research questions in these three areas.
Information seeking research often reports about types of information resources, ways of acquiring them and opinions on their importance in various professions. Based on self-reporting, these ...findings are affected by human memory and rationalisation. This article proposes a new way of studying information resource use – based on dwell time in the context provided by concrete work tasks. We use log data of 21 information workers from six organisations to analyse how work task complexity is connected to the time used in various information resources; how task complexity is connected to information resource use in different task types. Unlike traditionally, our findings consist of objective data on which resource types are used, and for how long, in work tasks of varying complexity and type. For example, the findings suggest that growing work task complexity increases the dwell time in local personal computer (PC) resources; these resources are especially popular in intellectual tasks. Such findings help understand factors affecting information resource use. Likewise, they help focus attention on most time-consuming aspects of task-based information interaction when developing support for work.
Tämä artikkeli on suomenkielinen lyhennelmä Salton-palkinnon (http://sigir.org/awards/gerard-salton-awards/) vastaanottopuheesta, jonka professori (emer.) Kalervo Järvelin piti 41. ACM SIGIR ...–konferenssin yhteydessä 9. heinäkuuta 2018 Ann Arborissa (MI) USA:ssa.
Aluksi tekijä kertoo taustastaan ja tarkastelee sitten joitakin tiedon hankinnan ja haun osa-alueita, jotka ovat olleet keskeisiä tekijän tutkimustyössä. Näihin kuuluvat tehtäväperusteinen tiedon hankinta ja informaatiovuorovaikutus, luonnollisen kielen käsittely yksi- ja monikielistä tiedonhakua varten ja tiedonhaun evaluointimetriikat. Lopuksi tekijä luonnostelee lähestymistavan informaatiovuorovaikutusta koskevan tutkimuksen organisointiin.
Puhe on julkaistu englanniksi kokonaan SIGIR Forum verkkolehdessä, vol. 52 no. 2 (http://sigir.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/p052.pdf).
PurposeThis paper analyses the research in Library and Information Science (LIS) and reports on (1) the status of LIS research in 2015 and (2) on the evolution of LIS research longitudinally from ...1965 to 2015.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs a quantitative intellectual content analysis of articles published in 30+ scholarly LIS journals, following the design by Tuomaala et al. (2014). In the content analysis, we classify articles along eight dimensions covering topical content and methodology.FindingsThe topical findings indicate that the earlier strong LIS emphasis on L&I services has declined notably, while scientific and professional communication has become the most popular topic. Information storage and retrieval has given up its earlier strong position towards the end of the years analyzed. Individuals are increasingly the units of observation. End-user's and developer's viewpoints have strengthened at the cost of intermediaries' viewpoint. LIS research is methodologically increasingly scattered since survey, scientometric methods, experiment, case studies and qualitative studies have all gained in popularity. Consequently, LIS may have become more versatile in the analysis of its research objects during the years analyzed.Originality/valueAmong quantitative intellectual content analyses of LIS research, the study is unique in its scope: length of analysis period (50 years), width (8 dimensions covering topical content and methodology) and depth (the annual batch of 30+ scholarly journals).
This article first analyzes library and information science (LIS) research articles published in core LIS journals in 2005. It also examines the development of LIS from 1965 to 2005 in light of ...comparable data sets for 1965, 1985, and 2005. In both cases, the authors report (a) how the research articles are distributed by topic and (b) what approaches, research strategies, and methods were applied in the articles. In 2005, the largest research areas in LIS by this measure were information storage and retrieval, scientific communication, library and information‐service activities, and information seeking. The same research areas constituted the quantitative core of LIS in the previous years since 1965. Information retrieval has been the most popular area of research over the years. The proportion of research on library and information‐service activities decreased after 1985, but the popularity of information seeking and of scientific communication grew during the period studied. The viewpoint of research has shifted from library and information organizations to end users and development of systems for the latter. The proportion of empirical research strategies was high and rose over time, with the survey method being the single most important method. However, attention to evaluation and experiments increased considerably after 1985. Conceptual research strategies and system analysis, description, and design were quite popular, but declining. The most significant changes from 1965 to 2005 are the decreasing interest in library and information‐service activities and the growth of research into information seeking and scientific communication.
Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) resources, such as dictionaries and parallel corpora, are scarce for special domains. Obtaining comparable corpora automatically for such domains could be ...an answer to this problem. The Web, with its vast volumes of data, offers a natural source for this. We experimented with focused crawling as a means to acquire comparable corpora in the genomics domain. The acquired corpora were used to statistically translate domain-specific words. The same words were also translated using a high-quality, but non-genomics-related parallel corpus, which fared considerably worse. We also evaluated our system with standard information retrieval (IR) experiments, combining statistical translation using the Web corpora with dictionary-based translation. The results showed improvement over pure dictionary-based translation. Therefore, mining the Web for comparable corpora seems promising.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to find out which research topics and methods in information science (IS) articles are used in other disciplines as indicated by ...citations.Design/methodology/approachThe study analyzes citations to articles in IS published in 31 scholarly IS journals in 2015. The study employs content analysis of articles published in 2015 receiving citations from publication venues representing IS and other disciplines in the citation window 2015–2021. The unit of analysis is the article-citing discipline pair. The data set consists of 1178 IS articles cited altogether 25 K times through 5 K publication venues. Each citation is seen as a contribution to the citing document’s discipline by the cited article, which represents some IS subareas and methodologies, and the author team's disciplinary composition, which is inferred from the authors’ affiliations.FindingsThe results show that the citation profiles of disciplines vary depending on research topics, methods and author disciplines. Disciplines external to IS are typically cited in IS articles authored by scholars with the same background. Thus, the export of ideas from IS to other disciplines is evidently smaller than the earlier findings claim. IS should not be credited for contributions by other disciplines published in IS literature.Originality/valueThis study is the first to analyze which research topics and methods in the articles of IS are of use in other disciplines as indicated by citations.
The paper reports the evolution of scientific research on usage of large datasets in online consumer behaviour between 2000 and 2018. Thus, it affords information regarding the evolution of the field ...in terms of identifying key publications and authors as well as how certain topics have evolved over time. In addition, by utilising topic modelling and text analytic techniques, it is identified certain research themes from the papers within the published articles included in the dataset. This offers a guide to those who want to contribute to the field. In addition, paper contributes to the methodology related to literature surveys and bibliometric analyses by conducted topic modelling to extract the latent topics from the collected literature by utilising Structural Topic Modelling in order to gain more elaborated results.
The study analyses contributions to Library and Information Science (LIS) by researchers representing various disciplines. How are such contributions associated with the choice of research topics and ...methodology? The study employs a quantitative content analysis of articles published in 31 scholarly LIS journals in 2015. Each article is seen as a contribution to LIS by the authors' disciplines, which are inferred from their affiliations. The unit of analysis is the article‐discipline pair. Of the contribution instances, the share of LIS is one third. Computer Science contributes one fifth and Business and Economics one sixth. The latter disciplines dominate the contributions in information retrieval, information seeking, and scientific communication indicating strong influences in LIS. Correspondence analysis reveals three clusters of research, one focusing on traditional LIS with contributions from LIS and Humanities and survey‐type research; another on information retrieval with contributions from Computer Science and experimental research; and the third on scientific communication with contributions from Natural Sciences and Medicine and citation analytic research. The strong differentiation of scholarly contributions in LIS hints to the fragmentation of LIS as a discipline.
Information searching in practice seldom is an end in itself. In work, work task (WT) performance forms the context, which information searching should serve. Therefore, information retrieval (IR) ...systems development/evaluation should take the WT context into account. The present paper analyzes how WT features: task complexity and task types, affect information searching in authentic work: the types of information needs, search processes, and search media. We collected data on 22 information professionals in authentic work situations in three organization types: city administration, universities, and companies. The data comprise 286 WTs and 420 search tasks (STs). The data include transaction logs, video recordings, daily questionnaires, interviews. and observation. The data were analyzed quantitatively. Even if the participants used a range of search media, most STs were simple throughout the data, and up to 42% of WTs did not include searching. WT's effects on STs are not straightforward: different WT types react differently to WT complexity. Due to the simplicity of authentic searching, the WT/ST types in interactive IR experiments should be reconsidered.
PDF
