This paper analyzes the years of publication, authors and their institutions, journal titles, and keywords of research papers relevant to academic libraries published in the 18 core journals of library and information science, which were downloaded from the full-text database of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The purpose of this paper is to discover the distribution of the research subjects, hot topics in library and information research, and development trends in the age of big data.
TopData And Method
The China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) full-text database was chosen as the data source. Due to the large number of research papers relevant to academic libraries in recent years, this study looked only at papers published in 18 core journals in the field of library and information science in order to reflect the highest quality of the present studies. Five search terms, including academic library, university library, college library, science research library, and research library, were input as retrieval subjects, and the period of publication was set from 2011 to 2015, resulting in 3,993 papers (retrieved on May 31, 2015). The bibliographic information about the papers, including titles, authors, institutions, keywords, abstracts, titles of journals, and years of publication, were transferred to Excel spreadsheets to be processed. In this process, some additional selections were made so as to ensure the accuracy of the data. Some examples of this involved eliminating items that were not relevant to academic libraries, such as some dynamic newsletters, conference notices, contributions invitations, etc.; removing duplicate papers that were published in multiple journals, as well as papers without authors, keywords, or abstracts; and merging papers continually published in different issues to count them as one paper. Finally, 3,676 relevant papers were collected.
The basic goal of this paper is firstly to provide a statistical analysis of these papers, specifically looking at authors and their institutions, years of publication, and the journals in which they were published, so as to study the distribution of the research subjects. Then, this paper aims to reveal the latest hot topics in research, and to identify the research developmental trends based on the frequency and co-occurrence network analysis of keywords.