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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.

Bibliometrics is one of the research fields in library and information science that deals with the analysis of academic entities. In this regard, to gauge the productivity and popularity of authors, publication counts and citation counts are common bibliometric measures. Similarly, the significance of a journal is measured using another bibliometric measure, impact factor. However, scarce attention has been paid to find the impact and productivity of conferences using these bibliometric measures. Moreover, the application of the existing techniques rarely finds the impact of conferences in a distinctive manner. The purpose of this paper is to propose and compare the DS-index with existing bibliometric indices, such as h-index, g-index and R-index, to study and rank conferences distinctively based on their significance.

The DS-index is applied to the self-developed large DBLP data set having publication data over 50 years covering more than 10,000 conferences.

The empirical results of the proposed index are compared with the existing indices using the standard performance evaluation measures. The results confirm that the DS-index performs better than other indices in ranking the conferences in a distinctive manner.

Scarce attention is paid to rank conferences in distinctive manner using bibliometric measures. In addition, exploiting the DS-index to assign unique ranks to the different conferences makes this research work novel.

The purpose of this paper is to show how bibliometrics would benefit from a stronger programme of construct validity.

The value of the construct validity concept is demonstrated by applying this approach to the evaluation of the h-index, a widely used metric.

The paper demonstrates that the h-index comprehensively fails any test of construct validity. In simple terms, the metric does not measure what it purports to measure. This conclusion suggests that the current popularity of the h-index as a topic for bibliometric research represents wasted effort, which might have been avoided if researchers had adopted the approach suggested in this paper.

This study is based on the analysis of a single bibliometric concept.

The conclusion that the h-index fails any test in terms of construct validity implies that the widespread use of this metric within the higher education sector as a management tool represents poor practice, and almost certainly results in the misallocation of resources.

This paper suggests that the current enthusiasm for the h-index within the higher education sector is misplaced. The implication is that universities, grant funding bodies and faculty administrators should abandon the use of the h-index as a management tool. Such a change would have a significant effect on current hiring, promotion and tenure practices within the sector, as well as current attitudes towards the measurement of academic performance.

The originality of the paper lies in the systematic application of the concept of construct validity to bibliometric enquiry.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize library and information science (LIS) as fragmenting discipline both historically and by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory about the organization of sciences and Fuchs’ (1993) theory about scientific change.

The study combines historical source analysis with conceptual and theoretical analysis for characterizing LIS. An attempt is made to empirically validate the distinction between LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The origin of fragmentation in LIS due the contributions of other disciplines can be traced in the 1960s and 1970s for solving the problems produced by the growth of scientific literature. Computer science and business established academic programs and started research relevant to LIS community focusing on information retrieval and bibliometrics. This has led to differing research interests between LIS and other disciplines concerning research topics and methods. LIS has been characterized as fragmented adhocracy as a whole, but we make a distinction between research topics LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The paper provides an elaborated historical perspective on the fragmentation of LIS in the pressure of other disciplines. It also characterizes LIS as discipline in a fresh way by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory.

The paper undertakes a bibliometric analysis and assessment of journal publications in the field of container terminal operations research (CTOR), in an attempt to identify high-impact papers (HIPs) published in Science Citation Index/Social Science Citation Index (SCI/SSCI) journals of CTOR subject category from 1973 to 2020.

A structured approach for identifying the HIPs is developed based on the utilization of bibliometric and network analyses.

The CTOR papers are assessed in terms of publication outputs, distribution of outputs in SCI/SSCI journals, authorship, institutions and countries, as well as citation life cycles of papers with the highest total citations since their publication until the year 2020. The results show that between 1989 and 2015, there were 82 HIPs in the field of CTOR, which have been cited at least 200 times, with more than 50% of these citations allocated in the second part of paper citation life cycle according to the database of Google Scholar.

The practical implication of the aforementioned reviewing and assessing journal publications of CTOR is that it offers the ability to reveal the tone of its development through addressing main characteristics of the relevant HIPs as determined by the highly cited papers in this field of research.

This paper offers a unique analysis and assessment in the field of CTOR by identifying the relevant HIPs and their associated scientific actors (authors, institutions and countries), thus facilitating the future research effort in the field of CTOR.

The European Journal of Marketing was created in 1967. In 2017, the journal celebrates its 50th anniversary. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to present a bibliometric overview of the leading trends of the journal during this period.

This work uses the Scopus database to analyse the most productive authors, institutions and countries, as well as the most cited papers and the citing articles. The investigation uses bibliometric indicators to represent the bibliographic data, including the total number of publications and citations between 1967 and 2017. Additionally, the article also develops a graphical visualization of the bibliographic material by using the visualization of similarities viewer software to map journals, keywords and institutions with bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis.

British authors and institutions are the most productive in the journal, although Australians’ are growing significantly the number of papers published. Continental European institutions are also increasing the number of publications, but they are still far from reaching the British contribution so far. In the mid-term, however, these zone’s authors and institutions, especially those from big European countries like France, Germany, Italy and Spain, should reach a closer performance to British ones; more as less long, historic, but more recent periods of analysis are considered.

This article is useful for any reader of this journal to understand questions such as papers’ European Journal of Marketing-related scientific productivity in terms of, for instance, contributors/authors, institutions and countries, or the main sources used to back them.

This is the first comprehensive article offering a general overview of the leading trends and researchers of the journal over its history.

Currently, studies involving innovation capability and sustainability have been gaining prominence. This logic is also permeating the firms, which need to adapt their innovation capabilities to sustainability. Therefore, the objective of this article is to map the field of innovation capability and sustainability to observe how these two areas have evolved over time.

The bibliometric method was used to conduct this study from the Scopus database.

The authors verified in their research that the theme appears in the literature in the mid-2000s, however as of 2013 it has gained strength, opening discussions on different fronts. The results show that theoretical and empirical research does not dissociate the fundamental logic of the firm that is to produce and remain competitive from the new logics of generating innovation capability for sustainability, on the contrary, sustainability is an important component for its economic performance.

No other studies are found in the literature that search for the state of the art of the evolution of the innovation capability and sustainability.

The purpose of this bibliometric analysis is to quantify the prominence and impact of published literature within the field. The research has been conducted with the intent of obtaining the expansion and characteristics of the literature on digital library.

More than 4,206 documents found in the period of 2002-2016 were collected from the ISI Web of Science and were analyzed to explore the annual productivity, yearly citation, most cited articles, prolific authors, eminent journals of the subject, productivity of institutes and contribution of countries. These results are based on the types of documents (articles, reviews, proceedings papers, book reviews, editorial materials and book chapters).

The core findings are that the most productive year of publication was 2016, and the growth of citation increased rapidly; the top source of title is electronic library. The result shows that the USA dominates in the research output, with Illinois University securing the first position; the most prolific author is Fourie I from South Africa. In the document types category, the most cited sources are research articles.

This research is useful for the researchers interested in the field of bibliometrics as it postulates an inclusive indication of provenance in the field of library and information science.

With the development of Web2.0 and publishing digitalization, traditional libraries and evaluation citation system can no longer indicate academic paper influence validly. Therefore, it is necessary to construct smart library and find the evaluation effect of Internet metrics-Usage.

This study puts forward four indexes of scholars’ evaluation based on Usage (total Usage (U), average Usage rate (U/N), h_u-index and p_u-index), which refer to citation indexes, takes the 35 high-output scholars in the field of library and information science in the WoS database as examples, analyzes performance of different scholars evaluation indexes based on Usage and compares the differences and correlations between “citation indicators” and “usage indicators.”

This study results show that p_u-index is the strongest index to evaluate scholars. Second, there is a high correlation and strong mechanism based on time dependence and interactions between Usage and citation. Third, compared to “citation indicators”, the “usage indicators” has a larger numerical value and wider measurement range, which can break the time limitation of citation, and scientifically evaluate young scholars and newly published paper by scholars.

This paper proposes the p_u-index – a relatively superior mathematical model for Usage and provides reference for the scholars’ evaluation policy of the smart library. This model can not only provide fair evaluation conditions for young scientists but also shorten the evaluation effect of the time lag of cited indicators. In addition, the “usage indicators” in this paper are new scientific evaluation indicators generated in the network environment. Applying it to the academic evaluation system will make the research papers widely accepted by the public and will also encourage scientists to follow the development of the Internet age and pursue research with equal emphasis on quantity and quality.

The aim of this study is to examine the bibliometric characteristics of literature published in Nature Nanotechnology in the first 10 years (2006-2015). Yearly output, impact factor (IF) changes, document type, top authors, institutes and countries, most cited articles were examined.

The bibliographic records related to Nature Nanotechnology were retrieved from SCIE of Web of Science. Various software tools such as HistCite, Sci2 tool, intcoll.exe and CitNetExplorer were used.

The results reveals that 55 per cent of publications were citable articles; average number of authors per article was 4.57; 136 per cent increase in impact factor and reviews received highest citations per paper. Harvard University had most number of publications, whereas University of Cambridge had highest CPP among the most productive institutes. Almost 50 per cent of publications were contributed by authors from the USA; 1 per cent of total publications received more than 1,000 citations.

Scientometric analysis of high impact journals has been carried out in very few. Hence, the results of the present study will be useful to compare with low impact journals.