Domain Analysis in Information Science: an analysis of the international scientific production

Abstract

The presence of domain analysis in the international literature on Information Science in the databases Scopus, LISA and Web of Science is analysed for the period 1995-2016. In order to achieve this, we conduct a domain analysis, and more specifically its bibliometric approach (Hjørland, 2002), of aspects related to authors, scientific venues, most productive periods, as well as the most cited authors, in order to identify how the epistemic communities of this domain are conformed (Meyer & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2010). The results show that this has been a prolific topic in the area, with a considerable growth of publications in the last decade, and published in the most important scientific journals in the area, namely Knowledge Organization, Scientometrics, JASIST, Journal of Documentation, and Information Processing & Management. The analysis of the theoretical references revealed an elite of 64 authors, in which research topics related to knowledge organization and metric studies in information stand out, revealing the articulation of two important approaches to domain analysis by Hjørland. This author is also revealed as the most cited author by far, and a central actor in this subject, as he was also its founder in Information Science two decades ago.