Academic libraries are not only service agencies that provide support and consultation for teaching and research at an institution but are also academic institutions as well. In our study, we found that some libraries have implemented reward systems to encourage librarians to conduct scientific research through which librarians work to improve research and research to improve work. This chapter analyzes academic research conducted by academic libraries in China with regards to scientific input and output. For input, we analyzed the types and numbers of funded projects, affiliated institutions, researchers, and research hotspots by studying the National Science Foundation projects in the field of library, information and document science conducted by academic libraries from 2005 to 2014. To study the scientific output, we analyzed the annual distribution of publications, affiliated institutions, authors, journals, and research funds by studying the papers produced by academic librarians published in SSCI-indexed and CSSCI-indexed journals in this field from 2005 to 2014.
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Since the 1990s, and especially in the 21st century, more and more academic libraries in China have participated in scientific research and have achieved many accomplishments. In recent years, some researchers have begun qualitative and quantitative analyses of scientific research by academic libraries in China in order to learn the relationship between library work and scientific research and to reveal the research status of academic libraries. There are three main categories of these research papers. The first category of papers is about the significance of academic research conducted by academic libraries with regards to theory and practice (Xie, 2006; Zou, 2005), the improvement of library services through academic research (Liang, & Sun, 2011; Long, 2005), the factors that influence academic research (Lin, 2011), and the experiences of academic libraries in conducting academic research (Dong, 2008; Zhang, 2008).
The second category includes papers providing statistical, quantitative analyses of funding support from the National Social Science Foundation of China in the field of library, information and document science. These studies analyze aspects such as the number and types of funded projects, geographical distribution, affiliated institutions, and project topics in order to discover the research status, hotspots, and development trends in the field (Li, & Wang, 2014; Yang, & Bai, 2012; Zhang, & Cao, 2011). Some papers in this category might analyze project objectives and outcomes, project closure rates, and outcome assessments to investigate the characteristics of the projects and provide references for project application, implementation, and performance management (Li, 2010; Zhang, & Dou, 2012).
The third category consists of papers using bibliometric methods to visualize research output characteristics and research hotspots in academic libraries or provide a quantitative analysis of them. These papers usually include a statistical analysis of the data, including the number of publications, authors, institutions, highly cited papers, and H-index information to offer a general view of the status of academic libraries in the field of research (Huang, Zhao, & Peng, 2009; Liu, 2013; Liu, 2014; Wang, 2015; Zhang, & Li, 2010; Zhao, & Miao, 2007). Some papers in this category provide statistical information about the frequency of keywords and co-word analysis in order to analyze the contents of the papers and thus identify research hotspots (Gu, 2014; Yu, Dong, & Tang, 2010). This chapter provides useful insights into the achievements in academic research accomplished by academic libraries in China from the two perspectives of National Science Foundation projects and international and domestic publications.