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The purpose of this study is to examine the research output on “library and information science” (LIS) research domain in South Africa. It also highlights the top LIS research organisations, authors, journals, collaboration types and commonly used keywords. This research will aid in the identification of emerging concepts, trends and advances in this subject.

The Web of Science (WoS), an indexing and abstracting database, served as a tool for bibliographical data. By applying advanced search features, the authors curated data from 1989 to 2021 through the WoS subject category WC = (Information Science & Library Science), limiting the scope to the region, CU = (South Africa), which resulted in 1,034 articles. Moreover, the research focuses on science mapping using the R package for reliable analysis.

The findings reveal that the publications have considerably grown over time, indicating significant attention among researchers in LIS. The findings indicate the critical operator’s performance, existing thematic choices and subsequent research opportunities. The primary topical fields of study that emerged from the bibliometric analysis are impact, information, science, model, management, technology, knowledge and education. Pouris and Fourie are the most productive citations, h-index and g-index. The influential institute was The University of Pretoria.

The use of the WoS database for data collecting limits this study. Because the WoS was the only citation and abstract database used in this study, bibliometric investigations using other citation and abstract databases like “Scopus”, “Google Scholar” and “Dimension” could be interesting. This study presented a bibliometric summary; nevertheless, a systematic and methodical examination of highly cited LIS research publications could throw more light on the subject.

This paper gives valuable information about recent scientific advancements in the LIS and emerging future academic subject prospects. Furthermore, this research work will serve as a reference for researchers in various areas to analyse the evolution of scholarly literature on a particular topic over time.

By identifying the standard channels of study in the LIS discipline, and the essential journals, publications, nations, institutions, authors, data sources and networks in this subject, this bibliometric mapping and visualisation provide new perspectives into academic performance. This paper also articulates future research directions in this realm of knowledge. This study is more rigorous and comprehensive in terms of the analytical procedures it uses.

This study aims to investigate the global issues of youth unemployment using bibliometric analysis covering the period from 1983 to 2022. There is a dearth of a bibliometric study analysis on unemployment, particularly youth unemployment even at the global level. The present study seeks to fill this gap by exploring the prominent studies related to youth unemployment at the global level.

Using VOSviewer software bibliometric results and the Scopus database, the study uncovered the most frequently cited, prominent and influential authors, as well as the institutions that have worked on youth unemployment and the most prominent keywords published on youth unemployment.

Nearly 80% of the research articles on youth unemployment were published from 2005 to 2022, and a significant increase in publication after 2012 is observed. Based on the published papers, the most studied determinants of youth unemployment are increased levels of regional economic advances, state demographics, relocation, household conditions, regional openness and export/import. Economic freedom, labour market reforms, economic growth, high proportion of part-time employment, active labour market policies, minimum wage norms, extent of bargaining scope and alignment are prominent determinants that reduce unemployment at large and improve labour market performance of youth in particular.

Bibliometric analysis, like the present study, can narrow down the most prominent sources of information on youth unemployment for beginners in this field of research.

This bibliometric study on youth employment assists researchers and policymakers in understanding and summarizing the necessary determinants of youth employment that are already being identified and studied based on practical evidence from the authors’ case study-based research work. The present study raises the issue of youth unemployment at large. It helps in identifying factors in one place and thus new researchers can use it as a starting point for their research on youth unemployment. It helps in providing clustering of factors. It highlighted the significant studies, authors and institutions working in this field.

On social implication, it can be argued that studies on topics related to human resources have a direct impact on society standards. By producing scientific knowledge that aids in the recognition of the complexities of human processes and behaviours, social science research significantly contributes to the enrichment of the community as a whole. When young people are unemployed, it causes social unrest and may increase crime and terrorism, all of which contribute to political instability. Youth unemployment causes psychological illness because of anxiety, alienation and depression. As a result, it causes social instability and necessitates immediate attention in all societies. The present study highlights that although the unemployment rate of youth is significantly higher in underdeveloped countries than the developed countries, their representation in the publication is significantly low. This under-representation of countries shows their lack of commitment to society in working on the issue of youth unemployment.

It is assumed that there are plenty of research studies on unemployment, particularly at the global level. However, various domains of researchers may require a bibliometric kind of analysis wherein they may get an idea about the prominent number of literatures arguing concerning issues at large, in the sense of “focused studies” covering the comprehensive viewpoint on youth unemployment. The paper aimed to emphasize the topic of youth unemployment, its development in the research field and the usefulness of bibliometric analysis in social sciences in general, and youth unemployment in particular.

Motivated with the ever growing number of bibliometric trend extrapolation studies, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate through two technologies how the selection of an upper limit of growth affects the correlation and causality of technology development measured with bibliometric data.

The paper uses Gompertz and Fisher-Pry curves to model the technological development of white light emitting diodes and flash memory, and show with extrapolation results from several bibliometric sources how a typical bias is caused in trend extrapolations.

The paper shows how drastic an effect the decision to set an upper bound has on trend extrapolations, to be used as a reference for applications. The paper recommends carefully examining the interconnection of actual development and bibliometric activity.

Despite increasing interest in modelling technological data using this method, reports rarely discuss basic assumptions and their effects on outcomes. Since trend extrapolations are applied more widely in different disciplines, the basic limitations of methods should be explicitly expressed.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the use of bibliometric indicators as a people analytics tool for examining research performance outcome differences in faculty mobility and turnover.

Employing bibliometric information from research databases, the publication, citations, h-index and newly developed individual annualized h-index (hIa-index) for a sample of university faculty is examined (N = 684). Information relating to turnover decisions from a human resource (HR) information system and bibliometric data from a research database are combined to explore research performance differences across cohorts of retained, resigned or terminated faculty over a five-year period in a single university.

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) results indicate traditional bibliometric indicators of h-index, publication count and citation count which are limited in their ability to identify performance differences between employment status cohorts. Results do show some promise for the newly developed hIa-index, as it is found to be significantly lower for terminated faculty (p < 0.001), as compared to both retained and resigned faculty. Multinomial logistic regression analysis also confirms the hIa metric as a predictor of terminated employment status.

First, the results imply that the hIa-index, which controls for career length and elements of coauthorship is a superior bibliometric indicator for comparison of research performance.

Results suggest that the hIa metric may serve as a useful tool for the examination of employment decisions for universities. It also highlights the potential usefulness of bibliometric indicators for people analytics and the examination of employment decisions, performance management and faculty turnover in research-intensive higher education contexts.

This empirical paper is entirely unique. No research has previously examined the issue of turnover in a university setting using the bibliometric measures employed here. This is a first example of the potential use of hIa bibliometric index as an HR analytics tool for the examination of HR decisions such as employee turnover in the university context.

Several bibliometric indicators that are extensively used to estimate research performance have not been validated against an external criterion of excellence. This paper aims to investigate whether this validation is possible using the number of Nobel Prize awards.

This study uses several analytical treatments of the data to investigate: whether Nobel Prize awards are sporadic events or they depend on the scientific activity of countries or institutions and can be used in research evaluation; and the association between the number of Nobel Prize achievements and conventional bibliometric indicators across countries and institutions.

This study finds that conventional bibliometric indicators, numbers of publications, citations, and top 1 per cent most cited publications, correlate with the number of Nobel Prize achievements in several advanced countries with similar research abilities. Contrarily, in countries and institutions with more variable research characteristics, there is no association between conventional bibliometric indicators and the number of Nobel Prize achievements, and their use as indicators of research excellence is not valid. In contrast, the number of national articles in Nature and Science correlates with the number of Nobel Prize achievements across countries and institutions.

Science administrators implementing research evaluations and research incentives based on conventional bibliometric indicators should consider that increasing the scores of these indicators does not imply an improvement in research excellence.

The study demonstrates that Nobel Prize achievements are not singular events that occur by chance. Therefore, the number of Nobel Prize achievements can be used to validate bibliometric indicators.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the methods and findings of a pilot study which applied bibliometrics and webometrics to examine collaboration in Malaysian biotechnology.

The research applied bibliometric and webometric methods to publications and web sites affiliated with Malaysian institutions. The bibliometric analysis focused on biotechnology‐related journal articles indexed in Web of Knowledge. The webometric analysis examined the web sites of top biotechnology institutions generated in the bibliometric analysis. Collaboration behaviour was assessed in three ways: intra‐institutional versus inter‐institutional; national versus international collaboration; and by type of institution collaboration according to the triple helix model.

Findings of the pilot study, which applied bibliometric and webometric analyses to a limited sample, indicate that the methodologies will collect the desired data for a more extensive study.

The quantitative research results describe the collaboration evident in publications and web sites, but not why it has happened in such a way.

The methodologies provide a framework for similar research exploring the impacts of collaboration in an e‐research environment. The methodology is innovative and practical in terms of the combined use of bibliometric and webometric analyses.

This is one of few studies that has examined collaboration using both bibliometric and webometric methods, and elements of the methodology appear to be unique to the study. The methodologies will contribute to an emerging body of literature that explores the nature of research productivity and research collaboration.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the research and publication trends in the articles published in the conference proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) since the year 2000.

We analyzed two decades of ASIS&T proceedings to uncover bibliometric patterns. This study uses two bibliometric procedures applied to the publications in the ASIS&T conference proceedings – a bibliometrics analysis using three data sources (Scopus, ASIS&T proceedings website and Scimago journal ranking) and a scientific mapping analysis using VOSViewer.

We found 3,129 publications from 2000 to 2020, with more than three-quarters jointly authored. Most authors are from the United States, Canada and China. Social media and information behavior are the top-researched areas. The top-cited journals are the Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Information Processing and Management and Library and Information Science Research.

The study will help information professionals understand patterns in recent research, which should help guide them in their future research directions.

The findings affirm ASIS&T’s move to an international association and point to the growing importance of collaborative work and social media.

ASIS&T has been holding annual meetings since the 1950s. While there have been various bibliometric studies analyzing publication trends in different journals in the field of information science, none of these studies have analyzed the ASIS&T conference proceedings.

How academic libraries support the research of their parent institutions has changed as a result of forces such as changing scholarly communication practices, technological developments, reduced purchasing power and changes in academic culture. The purpose of this paper is to examine the professional and educational implications of current and emerging research support environments for academic libraries, particularly with regard to research data management and bibliometrics and discuss how do professionals and educators “make space” as new service demands arise?

The present paper uses data from a recent survey of research support provision by academic libraries in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland, (authors 2013), and provides additional in depth analysis of the textual responses to extend the analysis in the light of forces for change in higher education. The original online questionnaire surveyed current and planned research support in academic libraries, and constraints or support needs related to service developments. It was distributed to 219 institutions in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland, and obtained 140 valid responses (response rate of 63.9 percent). Results were analyzed using descriptive statistics with thematic categorization and coding for the textual responses.

Most academic libraries surveyed are already providing or planning services in the focal areas of bibliometrics and data management. There was also increasing demand for other research support services, not the focus of the study, such as eresearch support, journal publishing platforms, and grant writing support. The authors found that while many academic libraries perceive increasing research support services as a “huge opportunity” they were constrained by gaps in staff skills, knowledge, and confidence and resourcing issues. With regard to staff education and training, it was reported they require a broader understanding of the changing research and scholarly landscape, the research cultures of different disciplines, and technological change. There was a near-universal support for development of more comprehensive, specialized, LIS education to prepare professionals for broader research support roles.

This further analysis of the implications of our survey in relation to influences such as economics, academic culture, technology, raises questions for both educators and practitioners about the future direction of the profession and how the authors collectively “make space” as new potential services arise.

As a pioneering and influential journal in the field of library and information science (LIS), the Journal of Documentation (JDoc) needs to be evaluated from a bibliometric perspective. This study aimed at conducting a bibliometric overview and visualization of the scientific output of JDoc from its inception in 1945–2018.

In this bibliometric study, 2056 papers published in JDoc were analyzed. All needed data were extracted from Scopus in 9 July 2019 in CSV format. Bibliometric analyses were done in Microsoft Excel. Visualization was done by Vosviewer software and applying techniques such as co-citation, co-authorship and co-occurrence. As a limited altmetric study, JDoc highly mentioned papers and the rate of their presence in social media were extracted from Altmetric LLP, too.

There was an increasing trend in published papers and received citations. Highly cited and most influential authors in JDoc are well-known in the field. However, the contributions of developing countries and their affiliated institutions to the journal were relatively low. This is true in case of author, country and institute co-authorship patterns. Highly frequent keywords and keyword co-occurrence patterns showed that the journal considered most topics related to LIS, including newly emerged ones. The authors and sources (generally journals) cited by JDoc are all prolific and influential ones.

The results of this study can be beneficial to JDoc editorial team for decision making on its further development as well as helpful for researchers and practitioners interesting in LIS field to have better contact with and contributions to the journal.

This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis on knowledge management from journals in the Scopus database between 1988 and 2021. The paper covered the past three decades of publications and carried out performance analysis and science mapping analysis of articles.

The study uses bibliometrics, performance analysis and science mapping analysis of 1,016 articles extracted from the Scopus database. The study examined the scientific productivity of articles, productive authors, citable documents, most relevant institutions, cited countries, co-occurrence of keywords, thematic mapping, co-citations and collaboration of authors and countries. The study used Biblioshiny as a tool to carry out the performance analysis and science mapping analysis.

The results show that the number of publications has significantly increased in the past decade, 88.4% of authors contribute at least a single article, 8.3% of authors published two articles, 2% of the authors published three documents and 0.6% of the authors contribute four papers. The USA, China and Australia were the most productive countries in terms of the total number of citations and foreign collaborations. Journal of Knowledge Management, Knowledge Management Research and Practice, VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management and International Journal of Technology Management are the top outlets in the knowledge management literature.

Over the past decade, the research on knowledge management construct has exploded because of the growing interest of researchers and practitioners in the field. Despite being a well-developed field, few studies have applied bibliometric analysis in the knowledge management literature. The study is more comprehensive in terms of the actors and methods involved in analyzing the scientific production of articles in the area of knowledge management.