Intellectual structure of library and information science from the perspective of "knowledge Domain Visualization"

To identify the patterns and trends of the Iranian LIS Studies and the changes made in the Intellectual structure of this field. Using the keyword co-occurrence method and the knowledge Domain Visualization approach, the intellectual structure of LIS has been studied. The research community is all research papers and articles of conferences that have been published by Iranian researchers in the period from 1970 to 2016 in the LIS journals and indexed on the WOS. Citespace software was used to map and analyze the network of Iranian studies.
Findings: Cluster analysis led to the identification of 10 clusters. Overall, it was found that the main focal points of the research are two general titles of "science studies" and "information studies", where the share of each of these two research centers from all identified clusters was 4, 5 Cluster. The largest cluster, according to the number of nodes, was "User Studies and Systems" and the oldest cluster based on the average year of formation, "scientific collaboration." The results of the analysis of the keywords burstness, "Internet", "World Wide Web", "User studies" and "Search engines" respectively, have attracted the most attention of the researchers of information science and science and are among the hot topics in the time series investigated. The network of the key words of Iran LIS studies is immature; so that from the total of 257 nodes present in the analysis process, 71 nodes were located between 2000 and 2009. One of the important points in reflecting on the analysis of the central nodes of the keyword network is related to the low centrality scores of the word “library” in spite of having high occurrence frequency; which may be interpreted as the reduction of pivotal role of this concept in the LIS literature