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The purpose of this study was to investigate the subject of “public libraries” in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) and Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC). The present study is a descriptive-analytical research adopting scientometrics approach in terms of data collection. The statistical population of the study consisted of 3122 documents indexed in the WoS during 1900-2019 as well as 232 documents indexed in the ISC during 1999-2017. To collect data, we refined the search to title as (TI=Public Library*) and limited it to the time span (PY=19002019) in WoS in order to avoid diversity in the retrieved documents. The same approach was followed to retrieve documents from ISC databases. Research findings showed that foreign researchers were interested in “information science and library”, “computer sciences”, and “architecture” in relation to public library studies. On the other hand, Iranian researchers focused on “public library studies”, “assessment”, and “staff studies including managers and librarians”. Considering the journals publishing research on public library issues, the findings showed that the American Library Journal (n=749) and the Iranian Research on Information Science and public libraries (n=134) published the largest number of articles on the subject at the global and local levels, respectively. USA, Canada, and England were the most productive countries in “public libraries” research area. Besides, University of Illinois and Islamic Azad University were the most active institutions publishing in this field at international and national levels with 62 and 57 documents, respectively. This study aimed to survey and compare research on public libraries in WoS and ISC. An examination of the subject area of public libraries revealed the trends of research fronts at the global level and in Iran and determines whether or not the topics of interest to world-class researchers are close to that of national researchers or if domestic researchers have addressed public library issues with an indigenous approach

This paper aims to introduce the quantitative method named Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS). With this method one can determine the historical roots of research fields and quantify their impact on current research. Using a quantitative method named reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS), this research tried to determine the historical roots of information seeking behavior research. RPYS pave the way for determining the significant years and works in information seeking behavior. The main problem is it can reveal whether Information Seeking Behavior has the same or different impact on these journals in terms of citation. Using scientometrics method, the initial data of this study have been extracted based on ISC Database. The revised data were analyzed and visualized in Excel. The distribution of cited references in information seeking behavior revealed four peaks within 20th century. Moreover, our analysis identified 4 peaks between 1989 and 2000 in the field of information seeking behavior, occurred respectively in 1989, 1993, 1998, and 2000. Based on the study findings, it seems that information seeking behavior research has been shaped intellectually by fields such as library and information science, management, etc. Moreover, it has been influenced by some theories and theoretical works.