Common Approaches in Assigning Library Science to Other Subject Areas by English Language Databases

The present survey attempts to study the subject overlap and interrelationship between library and information science and other subject fields. In the public’s view, the field of library and information science is believed to be a sub-discipline of the humanistic and social sciences. This conforms to the fact that in many databases, there is no choice but to choose the subject subcategory of humanistic or social sciences in order to obtain information regarding this field. Yet the way internationally accredited databases, which are among the most important operators in organizing and marketing scientific texts, subcategorize science into various branches and subbranches is different. This survey tries to establish the incorrectness of merely linking library and information science with humanistic sciences, to the extent that this is possible by means of an analysis of the subdivision of sciences in different databases.Design/methodology/approach:In the first place, categorization of science into various branches and subbranches by Willey, Scopos, Springer, and Science direct databases has been examined. These databases were chosen because of the relative generality of the subjects covered there, i.e. since the subjects are not specialized. Then the position of library and information science in this information set was pinpointed through specialized search. According to the results obtained from the databases under study, physics and computer sciences make the most amount of contribution in encompassing articles written on library and information science. Humanistic and the subbranches of social sciences come next. A small amount of the texts were also extracted from medical sciences.The results indicate that library and information science is neither a subdiscipline of humanistic sciences nor merely an area of interdisciplinary overlap, but of independent nature. Based on this study, it can be derived that library and information science is mostly interrelated with computer sciences in the first place and social sciences in the second.