Librarians as Research Partners: Their Contribution to the Scholarly Endeavour Beyond Library and Information Science

Academic libraries are increasingly called upon to demonstrate their value to their home institutions. Research collaboration with faculty resulting in the co-authorship of scholarly output is one possible way to demonstrate the alignment of the library with the institutional mission. Involvement in research also improves librarians' skills in offering research support services. This study explores the contribution of librarians to scholarly journals in fields other than Library and Information Science (LIS) as well as their collaboration practices with researchers in those fields. Results show an increasing number of papers published by library-affiliated authors in non-LIS journals between 2006 and 2015. The papers fall broadly into four areas: articles on topics related to LIS published in non-LIS journals; higher education and information literacy; systematic reviews and meta-analysis; and research collaboration in the faculty's areas of expertise. The study is limited by the difficulty in properly retrieving the scholarly output of librarians from bibliographic databases and the difficulty in ascertaining their contributions to published articles.