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To report on the 6th Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) 2004 Conference held in Cincinnati, Ohio, November 2004.

The VRD Conference is a two day meeting, organized annually by the Information Institute of Syracuse University, that focuses on the latest reference trends. The report is prepared by a library professional.

The conference was divided into the following tracks: Management, General, Evaluation/Standards, Technology, Resources, Research/Policy and Vendor Demonstrations. Generally there were six simultaneous sessions. The report includes sessions primarily from the Management and Evaluation/Standards tracks.

A brief conference report of interest to library and information management professionals.

It is a real pleasure to begin online reference reports with these papers. Herring and Tschudi write in a style that is upbeat and witty, yet their essays make significant statements about online services. Herring discusses how a small academic library replaced printed index subscriptions with online access, while Tschudi calls for a radical improvement in the way we educate and train online searchers. Future contributions will be as practical, informative and entertaining. — Marty Kesselman

The purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative analysis of the Library and Information Science (LIS) scholarly literature published worldwide.

The ISI Web of Science database was used as a source for extracting the data of published documents during the period 2003–2017. The analysis of the published literature was based on the following indicators: research productivity of each county, annual publications, annual citations, highly cited articles, highly cited LIS journals, most productive institutions in the field of LIS and most prolific authors. The types of documents included in this study were research articles, conference proceeding papers, book reviews and editorials.

The findings revealed that the USA had the highest overall output of LIS scholarly publications. The year 2016 was identified as the most productive year for the number of publications, whereas 2017 was identified as the most productive year for the number of citations. “Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of Science versus Scopus and Google Scholar” was the most highly cited article. The Journal of Medical Library Association was the most highly cited journal in LIS. Indiana University from the USA was the most productive LIS research institution. Mike Thelwall, from the UK, is identified as the most prolific author in LIS.

The study will be of interest for those researchers, who intend to conduct bibliometric research studies in LIS.