Topic Evolution of Library and Information Science Studies in the Last Twenty Years: A Co-Word Analysis

Background and Objectives: Topic evolutions of scientific and academic disciplines can be clarified by drawing scientific maps and identifies emerging or developed topics of scientific disciplines, sub-topics and the relationship between different topics of a discipline. The purpose of this study is to draw a strategic diagram to analyze the developments of the last twenty years of library and information science field.
Material and Methods: This was a Scientometrics study with co-occurrence analysis of words that was conducted on ten journals with the highest impact factor in the field of library and information science. Twenty years (1998-2017) publications were extracted from LISTA database and imported into SciMAT software. After preparing the data, all publications were divided into four time periods, strategic diagrams of each period were drawn and topic clusters were analyzed.
Results: The largest clusters of the first two periods were “Information Retrieval” and “Bibliometrics”, which in the next period “Citation-Analysis” appeared instead of “Information Retrieval” cluster, but nevertheless the largest node of this cluster was “Information Retrieval”. These clusters were the most developed topics in the field of library and information science.
Conclusion: Information retrieval and bibliometrics are at the forefront of library and information science. Sentiment analysis and information literacy with a cognitive approach are emerging topics in the field. Also, studies related to information production and related indicators have led to qualitative research.