A bibliometric study of literature on digital libraries

Abstract

Purpose

The study has been undertaken with the purpose of finding out the growth and characteristics of digital library literature.

Design/methodology/approach

Over 1,000 articles for the period 1998‐2004 were collected from LISA Plus and were analyzed to study authorship patterns, authors' productivity and prominent contributors, language‐wise and year‐wise distribution of articles, country‐wise distribution of journals, core journals in the subject area, and indexing term frequency.

Findings

Some of the important findings are that most articles (61 percent) are single‐authored; author productivity is not in agreement with Lotka's Law, except in one case where number of articles is three; the maximum number of articles were published in 2003 with English being the most productive language; maximum articles were published in the journal D‐lib Magazine; distribution of articles nearly follows Bradford's Law; and USA ranked first for maximum number of journals.

Originality/value

The paper is relevant to those interested in bibliometrics and provides a comprehensive overview of authorship in the library and information science community.

Citation

Singh, G., Mittal, R. and Ahmad, M. (2007), "A bibliometric study of literature on digital libraries", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 342-348. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710754841