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The purpose of this short reflection is to allow for an informed use of both phenomenography and phenomenology in information studies and cognate fields.

The paper apprises uses of phenomenography found particularly in accounts of information literacy commonly describing phenomenography as distinct from phenomenology.

Both phenomenography and phenomenology continue to hold much credence in methods applied across scores of academic fields, with information studies being among those in the vanguard. Claims displaying differences of phenomenography from phenomenology are misleading and incomplete descriptions of phenomenology.

The paper presents newer materials on the origins of phenomenography and phenomenology to advocate for tighter relationships between and clearer applications of these methods in information studies and beyond.

This paper relayed an important line of Mark Hepworth’s work, which engages with information technologies and development. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a subfield of library and information science (LIS) for development to reclaim the role of information services and systems for social change in rural areas. The paper looked at the extent of development gained with the advent of mobile phones.

Rather than undertaking traditional large-scale, quantitative, context-independent and survey-type research, the paper employed capability approach and semi-structured interviews to ascertain the experiences that mobile phone kiosk vendors in the rural Congo had of mobile phones.

It was found that mobile phones should be geared towards the liberation, and not utilization or commodification of humans and their needs and that mobile phones were not a catalyst of human basic capabilities.

Since the method employed is an in-depth qualitative analysis of mobile phone kiosk vendors, obtained results can be used to enrich or inform mobile phone experiences in other settings and groups.

This paper provided empirical evidence as to how an important group of mobile phone users could harness development with their mobiles.

Most LIS literature has presented mobile phones along the lines of information freedom or access, mass subscription, adoption rates, technological and entrepreneurial innovation, micro-credits, etc. However, the paper placed the topic development at the heart of LIS debates.

The purpose of this paper is to advocate for a clearer and less fragmentary use of qualitative research in the increasingly interdisciplinary research setting of information science.

The paper performs a textual analysis of more than 500 peer‐reviewed articles to assess information science's involvement with qualitative research. The paper undertakes historical criticism to trace qualitative research in the reviews of information science for the last three decades.

Authors are unclear and lax in their uses of basic research terms. Authors do not account for qualitative research's characteristics, methods, and contributions to information science's bodies of knowledge. Only 4.3 percent of published articles mention their contributions to information science's literature whereas 5.6 percent mention qualitative method(s) in their abstracts. Publications do not show (intra‐)collaboration between areas of information science. Information science's contributions to the theoretical discussions of the wider scientific community are lacking.

The paper discusses afresh information science's qualitative research. The paper suggests a tighter and long‐term investment of information science in qualitative research and the formation of the information science's own theorists and theory‐illumined practitioners. The paper puts forth some practical recommendations.