Growth and nature of international LIS research: An analysis of two journals

The study explores the publication trends of scholarly journal articles in two core Library and Information Science (LIS) journals indexed under ScienceDirect Database during the period for the period 2000–2010, and for the “Top 25 Hottest Papers” for 2006–2010. It examines and presents an analysis of 1000 research papers in the area of LIS published in two journals: The International Information & Library Review (IILR) and Library & Information Science Research (LISR). The study examines the content of the journals, including growth of the literature, authorship patterns, geographical distributions of authors, distribution of papers by journal, citation pattern, ranking pattern, length of articles, and most cited authors. Collaboration was calculated using Subramanyam's formula, and Lotka's law was used to identify authors' productivity. The results indicated that authors' distributions did not follow Lotka's law. The study identified the eight most productive authors with a high of 19 publications in this field. The findings indicate that these publications experienced rapid and exponential growth in literature production. The contributions by scientists from India are examined.

► The present study is a model of Global LIS research trend consolidating papers of two core journals.
► The results of the study indicate that, there is an upward trend in LIS research productivity has been visualized.
► Most of the papers from both journals in the sample relate to ICT age.
► Authors' contributions in this study are far from Lotka's Inverse Square Law of Scientific Productivity.
►  A. Mathur of India and D. E. Agosto from USA appeared prolific in journal ‘IILR’ and ‘LISR’.