Bibliometric overview of Library and Information Science Research in Spain

Abstract

This paper reviews 17 years of research in Library and Information Science in Spain. The total production of two major Spanish periodical publications in the field were analyzed from 1977–1994 according to productivity variables and thematic content. A total of 354 articles were analyzed using as a framework the conceptual and methodological model of L&IS research proposed by Jarvelin and Vakkari (1990). The Spanish research output seems to concentrate in the areas of information retrieval, description of services, and studies of scientific communication. However, there are differences in the concentration of topics per journal studied. The Spanish L&IS community seems straddled between a professional and a research orientation. Descriptive and discursive methods amount to 36% of the articles studied, while empirical methods amount to 33% of the articles. Authorship patterns suggest a prevalence for individual authorship (68%) and isolated instances of publication in non-Spanish language journals indexed by Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA).