Aspects of JASIS authorship through five decades

The Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) is completing 50 years of publication. Aspects of authorship of papers in JASIS were studied by examining one volume from each decade of JASIS's existence. For each substantial paper in these volumes, data were collected regarding number of authors, type of affiliation of each author, author's gender, and author's country if it was not the United States. Also noted were data on length, content, and “colonicity” of the title, and data on the extent of citing and self‐citing in the paper. Findings are presented, and are compared with findings of other studies of JASIS and related publications. Based on this survey of JASIS, the literature of information science has grown exponentially, as would be expected in a new or developing discipline. Authorship has been growing even a little faster, because multiple authorship of information science papers has become much more common. Representation of authors from different countries has increased greatly. But, compared to various library journals, JASIS is not outstanding in either multiple authorship or degree of foreign representation. Individual authors, at least in JASIS, are increasingly likely to produce multiple papers; the extent, explanation, and significance of this phenomenon warrant further inquiry. The percentage of authors who are female has grown, but is higher in many related journals than it is in JASIS. Trends in the titling of papers suggest that writings have become more informative, but also considerably wordier. “Scholarliness” of papers has increased on the basis of a rapid rise in use of colons in titles. More importantly, scholarship has increased greatly on the basis of the disappearance of papers that lack citations and the exponential growth in the average number of references per paper. It appears that the field of information science underwent an important transition in authorship characteristics after the 1950s. The proportion of authors with academic affiliations has grown so large that other types of affiliations, although significant in the 1950s, are now hardly represented at all. Contributions by authors whose professional concerns are primarily with applied aspects of information science have thus become rarer. Such changes may have serious implications for information science and for JASIS, and deserve study.