Cross-disciplinary collaboration versus coexistence in LIS serials: analysis of authorship affiliations in four European countries

Abstract

The interdisciplinary nature of library and information science (LIS) research has been highlighted for some time now. The term "interdisciplinary" is used primarily in the LIS literature as a general concept with different meanings that refer either to the coexistence of researchers from different scientific fields or to cross-disciplinary collaboration expressed in the form of coauthorship. This study analyses the disciplinary profile of LIS researchers with a view to ascertaining the actual level of cross-disciplinary collaboration and identifying all fields involved. Because of the complexity of identifying accurate affiliations at knowledge area level, the study was limited to authors from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. This analysis of authorship affiliation was performed based on research published in LIS serial titles indexed in Scopus during the 2010-2017 period. A rigorous and laborious process of identifying author affiliations was carried out. This involved checking the authorship of each paper and complementing this with information from websites, scientific social networks and other research endeavours whenever ambiguous situations arose. We observed that LIS departments produce barely a third of the research published in serial titles in the LIS subject category. Cross-disciplinary collaboration among all of the scientific fields involved is low, and even lower in LIS than in other fields. The low level of cross-disciplinary collaboration in LIS contradicts the interdisciplinary nature of LIS highlighted in the literature.

Disciplinary contributions to research topics and methodology in Library and Information Science—Leading to fragmentation?

“…Our study is the first to analyze the characteristics of research contributions to LIS by various disciplines. It elaborates earlier findings (e.g., Chang, 2018Chang, , 2019Chang & Huang, 2012;Urbano & Ardanuy, 2020) which show that disciplines external to LIS are responsible for over half of the research articles contributing to LIS. The study at hand analyzed in detail topical and methodological contributions to LIS by various disciplines.…”

“…The share of contributions by LIS in research articles was slightly over one third implying that other disciplines have a great influence on the LIS body of knowledge. This finding corresponds to the results of earlier studies (Chang, 2018(Chang, , 2019Chang & Huang, 2012;Urbano & Ardanuy, 2020) that other disciplines contribute more to LIS than LIS itself. Computer Science with a share of one fifth and Business and Economics with a share of one sixth are the major external disciplines contributing to LIS.…”

“…However, it is not reported which disciplinary backgrounds these articles come from. On the other hand, studies focusing on affiliations of authors in scholarly LIS articles describe the general contribution of various disciplines to LIS (e.g., Chang, 2018Chang, , 2019Chang & Huang, 2012;Urbano & Ardanuy, 2020). However, these do not analyze in detail the topical or methodological contributions produced.…”

Research Networks Generated by Organizational Structures, Co-Authorships and Citations: A Case Study of German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (Idiv)

“…While several studies have analysed the disciplinary variety of bibliographic references in papers to express the acceptance of concepts, methods and data from other subject areas, other studies have analysed the distribution of citations received by these papers from other areas. The analysis of citations and co-citations, in both cited and citing publications, constitutes one of the main approaches to the interdisciplinary phenomenon (Barlow et al, 2017;Dawson et al, 2014;Urbano & Ardanuy, 2020). This paper is an evaluation of the current state of research networks of a collaborative research centre through the analysis of articles and citations.…”

Application of Interdisciplinary Theory of Genres in LIS

“…According to Urbano and Ardanuy (2020), the term "interdisciplinary" is used in the LIS literature as a general concept covering two basic situations: cooperation in publishing 1 For the purpose of this paper LIS is understood according to Hjørland's definition (2019, 169): a study of human interaction with the universe of recorded knowledge. We will understand recorded knowledge as information.…”