Library and Information Sciences Research Literature in Sri Lanka : A Bibliometric Study

This paper presents a bibliometric study of US research literature emanating from Sri Lanka over 141 articles from the two LIS journals for the period from 1997 to 2007. Data collected from the two journals namely Journal of University Librarian's Association (JULA) and the Sri Lanka Library Review were analyzed to examine the type of US research, areas of LIS research and research strategies and data collection methods used by the LIS researchers in Sri Lanka. This paper also attempts to present an analysis of the authorship pattern, author productivity and prominent contributors, citation pattern, length of papers, language wise and year wise distribution of articles, growth and direction of LIS research papers over a period of ten years. The study is quantitative oriented and longitudinal in character. Sri Lanka LIS research output seems to concentrate in the area of "LIS Activities" and "Information Seeking". Some of other important findings are most articles (94%) are single authored, author productivity is not in agreement with the Lotka's Law. There is no definite growth pattern or positive growth in the area of LIS research in the country. English is the most widely used language. Average citation per article was 9 while average length of an article was 12. Key Words: Bibliometrics, Library and Information science, US Literature, LIS Research and Development doi: 10.4038/jula.v12i0.327 Journal of the University Librarians Association of Sri Lanka (Vol. 12) 2008 p.17-46


Introduction
Bibliometrics is associated with the quantitative measurement of documentary materials .It provides measurement that are useful for studying scholarly communication.Traditionally bi bliometrlc studies are used to measure the usage of materials and services within a library or to analyze the historical development of a specific body of literature.

History of Bibliometric studies
The history of bibliometrics go back more than a century yea..The statistical analysis of scientific literature began more than 50 years before the term "bibliometrics" even was coined in 1969.The emerging field was described in terms such as "Statistical Bibliography".(Parnell,2008) The word "Bibliometrics" has been derived from Greek words, Biblio means Book and Metrikos meaning Measurement, referring to the science of measurement relating to Books.(Dhiman,2000) Allan Pritchard first introduced the term bibliometric in 1969 to denote the "the application of mathematical methods to books and other media of communicationf', According to him definition and purpose of bibliometric is to shed light on the process of written communication and of the nature and course of a discipline (in so far as this is displayed According to British standards Institution, it is the study of the use of documents and pattern of publication in which mathematical and statistical methods have been applied (British standards institution, 1976) More recently Sengupta had defined this term as the "organization, classification and quantitative evaluation of publication pattern of all macro and micro communications along their authorships by mathematical and statistical calculus.(Senguptha,1990) Fairthome defines bibliometrics as the ' Quantitative treatment of properties of recorded discourse and behavior appertaining to itff ( Fairthome,l969) According to Potter, it is the study and measurement of the publication pattern of all forms of written communication and their authorship" (Potter,l981) Many definitions covering various aspeds of bibliometrics are available, but the common feature noted in all these definitions is the emphasis on quantitative aspect.
Bibliometric is a major sub-discipline of quantitative research.This tool traditionally used by the library and information science professionals for studying the communication process, information flows, and the others for better understanding and effective management and dissemination of information.(Rajendran, 2007)

Bibliometric studies an LXS research Literature
The literature of library and information science as a discipline has been extensively researched from a variety of perspectives.The systematic study of subject trends in L I S literature has been justified as a selfreflexive exercise to determine the historical roots of present library practice (AtkinsJ988) and to predict research trends in future.Wersing and Neveling (1976) presented one early reflexive analysis of LIS .Their normative view of U S has been contrasted with empirical analysis where subject classifications, and methodological approaches were derived from an examination of literature samples.(Cano,l999) Various contact analyses of LIS research publications have been made by many scholars around the world.These content analysis of US research publications can be roughly divided into two types in several ways: One method distinguishes between analyses, analyzed samples published in the short term (generally in one year) and in the long term: these analyses can also be divided at the national and international levels: or, in the comprehensive fields of U S and in the limited fields of LIS.Although these studies have some kind of deficiencies , they all have contributed to the development of this research subject.(Cheng,1996) For this study mainly used as a base of the research articles of two well known scholars in this fetid Jarvelin and Vakkari in 1990.In general, the content analysis model of Jarvelin and Vakkari consists of three parts: 3. The methods: research strategies and data collection methods (Cheng,1996) It is difficult to identiw the categories of the authors of LIS articles in Sri Lanka.Therefore only two parts of Jarvelin's and vakkari model use for data analyzing in this study.
1.The distribution of the articles over the topic

The methods: research strategies and data collection methods
At present, it is difficult to derive an adequate understanding of the development of particular U S subject areas, their theoretical foundations, and preferred methodological approaches because results reported in the literature are not cornparable.(Jarvelin and Vakkari, 1990) Though bibliometrics has quite long history in the world very few studies on bibliometrics in U S research literature found in Sri Lanka.

Objectives of the study
The aim of this study is to study the growth and related aspects of US research literature for the period from 1997 to 2007 in Sri Lanka .The objectives of the study are: 1. to examine the characteristics of US research, research strategy used and data collection method 2. to assess the growth of literature

Classification Scheme
The classification scheme for topics of US by Jarvelin and Vakkari (1990) was constructed of US and it's swbfield (Appendix 1) was adapted in order to examine the nature of U S research in the country.The data were collected and classified using the classification scheme devised by them.The main classes of LIS topics as follows: 1 .The Profession

C10. Not applicable
Each 'article published in the two LIS journals chosen was read and classified according to theme, methodology employed and data collection method used and noted down according to the year of publication.

Distribution of research articles over topics
Table 3 presents the distribution of articles over the topics.The Table 3 shows that the highest number of articles covered within the period of this study is under the heading of Library and information service activities with 44 articles (31°/0).Information seeking is the second most popular topic with 26 articles while other aspect of U S is in the third with 24 articles.he analysis reveals that the information retrieval is in fourth place with l9 articles.

Sinhalese
Further table 3 indicates that there is no definite growth pattern for any topic covered by the articles.

Research strategies used in the articles
The distribution of the research strategies in the articles from 1997 to 2007 is shown in the table 4.
The most popular research strategies used by US researchers were conceptual research method and the discussion paper which was in equal number ( 52) of articles.Table 4 further shows that a continuous increase in the use of the survey method from the year 2003.
Mathernatical/Logical method and content or protocol analysis method are less likely to be used in research literature in Sri Lanka.

Data Collection method used for LIS research
Data collections methods used for the research strategies are given in table 5.
Table 5 shows that the Thinking aloud is the most frequent data collection method was used for LIS research in Sri Lanka.The Questionnaire , interview and the Several method of collecting were also used for the U S research.Surprisingly, 23% of studies (33) were not applied any data collection method for the study.(Not applicable)

Authorship pattern and author productivity
Table 6 shows the authorship pattern of the articles.

Ranking of most productive author
Table 8 presents the most productive authors in the US research area.Followed by Sumana Jayasuriya,Sriyani Perera and Geetha Yapa with 4 articles each .Seven authors who contributed 3 articles each have taken the sixth place of ranking.Eleven authors with 2 articles and lastly 45 authors with 1 article each.It is noted that the most of the top six rank authors were affiliated with higher education institutions.

Author's Institutional affiliation
Institutional affiliation of authors is divided into three categories namely higher educational institutions, government institutions and private organizations.
Table 9 presents the distribution of authors by institutional affiliation.Above table reveals that out of 141 articles, the majority are written by authors affiliated to the universities with a total of 93 (66%) articles.

Citation pattern
The distribution of citation pattern is given in table 10.

Author self-citation
The frequency of author self citations in the references of the articles are identified in table l l.Further it has been observed that the average length of articles varied from a minimum of 6.78 pages to a maximum of 16.08 pages.4. The most frequent data collection method used for the LIS research in Sri Lanka was "Thinking Aloud".
5. Single authorship is prominent in the LIS field.
through written communication) by means of counting and analyzing various facets of written communication.Quantitative analysis can measure the growth , scattering of articles in different journals or to measure the obsolescence of literature in different discipline.(Prtitchard f 1969) It has extensive application in the field of LIS particularly with regard to studying the trends in a subject.It helps in formulating need based development policy and provides objective data to inform managers to take timely decisions.(Jena , 2006) The European information science journals, bibliometrics investigations began to popular in the 1970s and 1980s.Hungaryf eastern Germany and Switzerland were the countries which started to do research in bi bliometrics since the beginning of the research era Although famous Bradford's law (1934) of scattering ,Lotkafs Law (1926) of scientific productivity are regarded as milestones in bibliometrics, but bibliometric research actually started in late sixties.Later in the seventies and eighties, bibliometrics research took a distinct shape and emerged as a prominent discipline.With the advent of information and communication technology (ICT), web technology and availability of different databases online, the field of bibliometrics gain a momentum.
In order to examine the characteristics and trend of the LIS research in Sri Lanka two reputed journals have been selected and the criteria for selection these two journals was regularization of publication which was necessary for longitudinal data analysis.This study focused the articles published in the Journal of University librarian's Association (JULA) publish by the University librarian's Association in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lanka Library Review publish by Sri Lanka Library Association.The database of the study comprised 141 articles published in these two journals from 1997 to 2007.In the study each individual article was scanned , checked, examined and tabulated for necessary data in to separate sheets in terms of subject of article, research strategy and date collection method used ,names of authors, number of authorship, author's institutional affiliation, number of references, author's self citation, length of article, year of article etc.

( 20 )9
was published in year 1998 and there after a gradual decline is seen.However in last four years the growth of literature static with 12/13 articles per year which appear to be insignificant in terms of world U It is also important to note the language of publication.As usual English is the predominant language of publication.(Table2) are drawn from the study.1.It is seen that there is no definite growth pattern or positive growth of LIS research articles published from 1997 to 2007.subject wise analysis of the contents of the articles revealed that Library and Information services activities (LIS) was prominently studied (3I0h) in the LIS field.. LIS research literature in Sri Lanka seems to concentrate mostly in the area of U S activities , Information seeking , other aspects of L E and Information storage & retrieval.I n combination they covered over 81% of research articles.I n general the findings of the study indicate that the US research in the country has not changed greatly during the ten years period.3. The research strategies most frequently used by LIS researchers were conceptual research and the discussion papers whereas the least frequent were empirical, mathematical and historical methods.These results indicate that the selection of research strategies by LIS researchers in Sri Lanka is more towards the survey types.

6.o
It was found that the author productivity is not match with the Lotka's Law.The most prolific author is in the field was N.U.Yapa who contributed 10 articles.Majority of top ranked authors are affiliated to the Universities.7.The average citations per article are 9 (8.72).8.The articles have an average of 12 (12.28)pages which shows the reasonable length of a research article.Non bibliographic data bases(textual, numeric.. .)

Table l : Year wise distribution of papers
TableIdoes not indicate any definite growth pattern of the literature.During the ten year period the high decline of literature has been observed in year 1997 and 2001.The reason may be only one journal published (Library review) in these years.The highest number of articles

Table 2 : Language wise distribution Table
2 indicates that out of 141 articles, English occupies the first position with 117 articles.(83%)

Table 6 : Authorship pattern
articles (1.3%) by three authors.Only one article was written by multiple authors (4 authors) which is 0.7% of the total contribution.
Table7reveals .that the percentage of authors contributed only one article each was 63O/0 (45) which is larger than the original 6O0/o Lotka's data.On average 1.98 (Approx.2) articles published by each author.The Largest number of articles were contributed by an author is 10.As can be seen 15% of authors contributed to two articles which exactly match with the Lotka's Law.But in general the results do not match with Lotka's Law.

Table 8 : Rank list of productive authors in the field I Name Of Author 1 No.of contributions l Rank l
Table8shows that the most productive authors are N.U.Yapa who contributed 10 articles and Sriyani Illeperuma with 9 articles.Followed by W.R.G.Silva and M.B.M.Farooz both with six articles each.Padeepa Wijetunga and Ruwan Gamage are ranked fourth with 5 articles each.

Table 9 : Institutional Affiliation No. of contribution 93
The table 10 presents the year wise distribution of citations in the articles and the average of citations thereof, total number of citations and average citations per article.Table10reveals that total of 1229 citations distributed among 141 articles.It is also seen that the number of articles are increasing but not in a uniform manner.Similarly, the number of citations per year is varying from year to year.The highest number of citations per article is in the year 1999 and the lowest number of citations per article is in the year 1997.

Table 11 :
Author self citationOut of 141 of total articles only 11 (8%) contained author's self citations.This indicated that some of the contributors of the two journals under study are quite productive and are continuously working towards contributing more articles to LIS journals.

Table 12
contains distribution of articles according to their length.

Table 12 : Distribution of papers according to length
Table12reveals that the average length of articles is 12.28 pages.