Identifying the Research Fronts in Korean Library and Information Science by Document Co-citation Analysis

Abstract

By document co-citation analysis with Korean Citation Index (KCI) data, this study accurately identified the research fronts and hot topics in Korean library and information science (LIS) from 2004 to 2013. 159 core papers in LIS domain and their citations are scraped manually from Korean Citation Index web site. In the cluster analysis and network analysis, 159 core papers were grouped into 27 clusters with multiple papers and 8 singlton clusters. Among the 27 clusters which have multple papers, ‘LIS education’ cluster was the largest with 16 core papers, and ‘citation analysis & intellectual structure analysis’ cluster had the strongest citation impact according to the ehs-index. Closer observation of the citations to the core papers in each research front showed that 67.5% of the citations were made by LIS research papers and 32.5% of the citations were made by non-LIS research papers. Considering the share of citations and the citation impact growth index, ‘local documentation’, ‘citation analysis & intellectual structure analysis’, and ‘research trends analysis’ were identified as the most emerging research front in Korean library and information science. The analytical methods used in this study have great potential in discovering the characteristics of research fronts in Korean interdisciplinary research domains.