Authorship and Co-Authorship Structure of Knowledge and Information Science: Status of Presence and Influence outside the Borders

This research investigates the structure of Library and Information science based on indicators of authorship, co-authorship, and scientific influence model.

As practical research, based on scientometric and social networks analysis, the records have been retrieved from WOS by the selection of 35 journals from 1970 to 2016. The Citespace, visualization analysis tool, was used to accomplish co-authorship, UCINET for centrality metrics, and Bibexcel for the H-index family.

An exact study of the number of authors in each article indicates that the dominant authorship pattern of Iran Knowledge and Information science is a two-author pattern. In this regard, the three-author approach is in second place with a frequency of 25%. The results of the study also showed the Jamali, with 25 articles and Kousha with 481 citations, respectively, have been awarded the title of the most productive and most cited authors among the authors of Iran Knowledge and Information science. The medal of the largest share of the cooperation among institutes and universities was awarded to Islamic Azad University. Other results of co-authorship analysis of Iran Knowledge and Information Science showed that the collaboration of Jamali and Nicholas in the field of information-seeking behavior on the one hand, and Kousha and Thelwall collaboration in the field of science measurement studies (especially webometrics) on the other hand, are new trends. On the other hand, considering the bursting of the occurrence of the Jamali and Nicholas in the co-authorship network of Iran Knowledge and Information Science, these two authors should be regarded as a kind of creators of an emerging trend in Iran Knowledge and Information Science. Finally, the findings showed that almost half of the articles in the Iran Knowledge and Information Science (46.3%) had been prepared with the collaboration of authors from other countries. Iranian researchers have collaborated mostly with Asian countries. They have collaborated mostly with Malaysian researchers and, the second place with 14 frequencies is allocated to Australian researchers.

The existence of a significant relationship between the two indicators of productivity and effect showed that the authors of Iran Knowledge and Information Science, while paying attention to the increase in the number of articles and their level of productivity, have also noted the quality of the articles. The results showed that merely receiving more citations, or increasing the level of scientific participation of a researcher, is not a sufficient condition for macro-scientific decision-making and policy-making, and the use of qualitative indicators and methods to validate the results of scientometric research in this regard seems necessary. Other results also showed that the increasing interest of Iranian researchers in collaborating with other authors in the production of joint scientific articles, has played a significant role in increasing visibility and receiving more citations over time.