A profile in statistics of journal articles : fifty years of American documentation and the Journal of the American Society for Information Science for Information Science

JASIS has consistently been identified as one the major information science and library journals both in the United States as well as for the rest of the world (Kohl & Davis, 1985; Rice 1990; Siddiqui, 1997; Wormell, 1998; Nisonger, 1999). The Journal has also long been regarded as one of the discipline's chief archival documents. And archival documents retain their influence over their disciplines far longer than do other quality publications (Griffith et al, 1979). Based on our analysis of articles published in AD and JASIS from 1950 to 1999, we find that there has been a slow but perhaps inevitable shift based first on the single non-funded researcher and author to a much wider research and publishing participation among authors, regions, corporate authors, and countries. This suggests not only cross-fertilization of ideas, but also more complex research questions. A small trend toward greater external funding further reinforces this finding. We also chose to close our data collection with the last number of volume 50. This is less by design than by serendipity, since the data collection and initial analyses were conceived as a class project for the Elements of Research course of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma for fall semester 1999Peer reviewe