IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v14y2020i4s1751157719305024.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Information Science and Library Science (IS-LS) journal subject categorisation and comparison based on editorship information

Author

Listed:
  • Xie, Yundong
  • Wu, Qiang
  • Zhang, Peng
  • Li, Xingchen

Abstract

Journal subject categorisation is not only a significant foundation for evaluating journal impact and ranking journals but also has become an increasingly important research focus in academia. As the gatekeepers of scholarly journals, editors play a critical role in directing their journal’s subject orientation. In this study, the category of Information Science and Library Science (IS-LS) is reclassified according to editorship information covering research interests, research experience, professional identity, and affiliated departments. Unlike earlier studies using interlocking editorship data, this study utilises the subject-related information of 232 editors to classify 77 IS-LS journals into five categories: Management Information Systems (MIS, 22 journals), Information Science (IS, 14 journals), Library Science (LS, 28 journals), Scientometrics (SM, 3 journals), and “Others” (10 journals). The study concludes that there are descriptive differences in editorship characteristics for the subfields’ journals, such as a size advantage in the editorial team of the majority of MIS journals compared to LIS journals (our LIS category consists of IS, LS, and SM journals). Our technique of journal subject categorisation is novel, making our research meaningful and helpful for editorial team governance of journals, including, in selecting editors with a variety of research focus backgrounds.

Suggested Citation

  • Xie, Yundong & Wu, Qiang & Zhang, Peng & Li, Xingchen, 2020. "Information Science and Library Science (IS-LS) journal subject categorisation and comparison based on editorship information," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:14:y:2020:i:4:s1751157719305024
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2020.101069
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157719305024
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101069?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Jean A. Pratt & Karina Hauser, 2008. "Using field cocitation analysis to assess reciprocal and shared impact of LIS/MIS fields," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(9), pages 1441-1453, July.
    2. Stephen J. Bensman & Loet Leydesdorff, 2009. "Definition and identification of journals as bibliographic and subject entities: Librarianship versus ISI Journal Citation Reports methods and their effect on citation measures," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(6), pages 1097-1117, June.
    3. Yuen-Hsien Tseng & Ming-Yueh Tsay, 2013. "Journal clustering of library and information science for subfield delineation using the bibliometric analysis toolkit: CATAR," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(2), pages 503-528, May.
    4. Michael Hall, C., 2011. "Publish and perish? Bibliometric analysis, journal ranking and the assessment of research quality in tourism," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 16-27.
    5. Kevin W. Boyack & Richard Klavans & Katy Börner, 2005. "Mapping the backbone of science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 64(3), pages 351-374, August.
    6. A. Abrizah & A. N. Zainab & K. Kiran & R. G. Raj, 2013. "LIS journals scientific impact and subject categorization: a comparison between Web of Science and Scopus," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 94(2), pages 721-740, February.
    7. Jessica Petersen & Fabian Hattke & Rick Vogel, 2017. "Editorial governance and journal impact: a study of management and business journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(3), pages 1593-1614, September.
    8. Chaoqun Ni & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Blaise Cronin, 2013. "Visualizing and comparing four facets of scholarly communication: producers, artifacts, concepts, and gatekeepers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 94(3), pages 1161-1173, March.
    9. Feifei Wang & Dietmar Wolfram, 2015. "Assessment of journal similarity based on citing discipline analysis," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(6), pages 1189-1198, June.
    10. Bruno S. Frey & Katja Rost, 2010. "Do rankings reflect research quality?," Journal of Applied Economics, Universidad del CEMA, vol. 13, pages 1-38, May.
    11. Yundong Xie & Qiang Wu & Xingchen Li, 2019. "Editorial team scholarly index (ETSI): an alternative indicator for evaluating academic journal reputation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1333-1349, September.
    12. Baccini, Alberto & Barabesi, Lucio, 2011. "Seats at the table: The network of the editorial boards in information and library science," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 382-391.
    13. Chaoqun Ni & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Jiepu Jiang, 2013. "Venue-author-coupling: A measure for identifying disciplines through author communities," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(2), pages 265-279, February.
    14. Juan Miguel Campanario & William Cabos, 2014. "The effect of additional citations in the stability of Journal Citation Report categories," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(2), pages 1113-1130, February.
    15. Wolfgang Glänzel & András Schubert, 2003. "A new classification scheme of science fields and subfields designed for scientometric evaluation purposes," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 56(3), pages 357-367, March.
    16. Mu-hsuan Huang & Wang-Ching Shaw & Chi-Shiou Lin, 2019. "One category, two communities: subfield differences in “Information Science and Library Science” in Journal Citation Reports," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 1059-1079, May.
    17. Chaoqun Ni & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Jiepu Jiang, 2013. "Venue‐author‐coupling: A measure for identifying disciplines through author communities," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(2), pages 265-279, February.
    18. A. Abrizah & A. Noorhidawati & A. N. Zainab, 2015. "LIS journals categorization in the Journal Citation Report: a stated preference study," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1083-1099, February.
    19. Anne-Wil Harzing, 2013. "Document categories in the ISI Web of Knowledge: Misunderstanding the Social Sciences?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 94(1), pages 23-34, January.
    20. Loet Leydesdorff, 2006. "Can scientific journals be classified in terms of aggregated journal‐journal citation relations using the Journal Citation Reports?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 57(5), pages 601-613, March.
    21. Alireza Tahai & Michael J. Meyer, 1999. "A revealed preference study of management journals’ direct influences," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(3), pages 279-296, March.
    22. Loet Leydesdorff & Ismael Rafols, 2009. "A global map of science based on the ISI subject categories," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(2), pages 348-362, February.
    23. Ismael Rafols & Loet Leydesdorff, 2009. "Content‐based and algorithmic classifications of journals: Perspectives on the dynamics of scientific communication and indexer effects," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(9), pages 1823-1835, September.
    24. Jonathan M. Levitt & Mike Thelwall & Charles Oppenheim, 2011. "Variations between subjects in the extent to which the social sciences have become more interdisciplinary," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(6), pages 1118-1129, June.
    25. Leydesdorff, Loet & Bornmann, Lutz & Zhou, Ping, 2016. "Construction of a pragmatic base line for journal classifications and maps based on aggregated journal-journal citation relations," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 902-918.
    26. Thomas E. Nisonger, 2002. "The relationship between international editorial board composition and citation measures in political science, business, and genetics journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 54(2), pages 257-268, June.
    27. Jonathan M. Levitt & Mike Thelwall & Charles Oppenheim, 2011. "Variations between subjects in the extent to which the social sciences have become more interdisciplinary," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(6), pages 1118-1129, June.
    28. Mark P. Carpenter & Francis Narin, 1973. "Clustering of scientific journals," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 24(6), pages 425-436, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Xiaoguang Wang & Hongyu Wang & Han Huang, 2021. "Evolutionary exploration and comparative analysis of the research topic networks in information disciplines," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4991-5017, June.
    2. Urdiales, Cristina & Guzmán, Eduardo, 2024. "An automatic and association-based procedure for hierarchical publication subject categorization," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    3. Baccini, Federica & Barabesi, Lucio & Baccini, Alberto & Khelfaoui, Mahdi & Gingras, Yves, 2022. "Similarity network fusion for scholarly journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1).
    4. Sümeyye Akça & Özlem Şenyurt, 2023. "Geographical representation of editorial boards: a review in the field of library and information sciences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(2), pages 1409-1427, February.
    5. Sun, Zhuanlan & Liu, Sheng & Li, Yiwei & Ma, Chao, 2023. "Expedited editorial decision in COVID-19 pandemic," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1).
    6. Zhang, Tianjiao & Shi, Jin & Situ, Lingyun, 2021. "The correlation between author-editorial cooperation and the author’s publications in journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mu-hsuan Huang & Wang-Ching Shaw & Chi-Shiou Lin, 2019. "One category, two communities: subfield differences in “Information Science and Library Science” in Journal Citation Reports," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 1059-1079, May.
    2. Urdiales, Cristina & Guzmán, Eduardo, 2024. "An automatic and association-based procedure for hierarchical publication subject categorization," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    3. Yu-Wei Chang, 2019. "Are articles in library and information science (LIS) journals primarily contributed to by LIS authors?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(1), pages 81-104, October.
    4. Yan, Erjia & Ding, Ying & Cronin, Blaise & Leydesdorff, Loet, 2013. "A bird's-eye view of scientific trading: Dependency relations among fields of science," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 249-264.
    5. Loet Leydesdorff & Lutz Bornmann & Caroline S. Wagner, 2017. "Generating clustered journal maps: an automated system for hierarchical classification," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(3), pages 1601-1614, March.
    6. Baccini, Federica & Barabesi, Lucio & Baccini, Alberto & Khelfaoui, Mahdi & Gingras, Yves, 2022. "Similarity network fusion for scholarly journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1).
    7. A. Abrizah & A. Noorhidawati & A. N. Zainab, 2015. "LIS journals categorization in the Journal Citation Report: a stated preference study," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1083-1099, February.
    8. Wolfram, Dietmar & Zhao, Yuehua, 2014. "A comparison of journal similarity across six disciplines using citing discipline analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 840-853.
    9. Ismael Rafols & Alan Porter & Loet Leydesdorff, 2009. "Overlay Maps of Science: a New Tool for Research Policy," SPRU Working Paper Series 179, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    10. Chiara Carusi & Giuseppe Bianchi, 2020. "A look at interdisciplinarity using bipartite scholar/journal networks," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(2), pages 867-894, February.
    11. Yu-Wei Chang, 2018. "Examining interdisciplinarity of library and information science (LIS) based on LIS articles contributed by non-LIS authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(3), pages 1589-1613, September.
    12. Yongjun Zhu & Erjia Yan, 2015. "Dynamic subfield analysis of disciplines: an examination of the trading impact and knowledge diffusion patterns of computer science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 104(1), pages 335-359, July.
    13. Leydesdorff, Loet & Bornmann, Lutz & Zhou, Ping, 2016. "Construction of a pragmatic base line for journal classifications and maps based on aggregated journal-journal citation relations," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 902-918.
    14. Jing Zhang & Xiaomin Liu & Lili Wu, 2016. "The study of subject-classification based on journal coupling and expert subject-classification system," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(3), pages 1149-1170, June.
    15. Wang, Qi & Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "Large-scale analysis of the accuracy of the journal classification systems of Web of Science and Scopus," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 347-364.
    16. Leydesdorff, Loet & Rafols, Ismael, 2012. "Interactive overlays: A new method for generating global journal maps from Web-of-Science data," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 318-332.
    17. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
    18. Zhang, Baolong & Wang, Hao & Deng, Sanhong & Su, Xinning, 2020. "Measurement and analysis of Chinese journal discriminative capacity," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(1).
    19. Hric, Darko & Kaski, Kimmo & Kivelä, Mikko, 2018. "Stochastic block model reveals maps of citation patterns and their evolution in time," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 757-783.
    20. Erjia Yan, 2014. "Topic-based Pagerank: toward a topic-level scientific evaluation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 100(2), pages 407-437, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:14:y:2020:i:4:s1751157719305024. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.