Mapping of research about sustainable development in library & information Science : A bibliometric study

The aim of this study was to investigate how the concept Sustainable development has been researched in Library &Information Science based on Web of Science category “Information Science & Library Science”. The research questions were: 1. From which countries came the researchers from who have done research about sustainable development in library &information science? 2. Which academic disciplines are cited in research by articles in Library & Information Science about sustainable development? 3. Which journals have published research about sustainable development in library & information science? 4. Which keywords can be found together with the concept of sustainable development in research in library & information science? Research articles were retrieved from the database Web of Science. Different quantitative methods were used to analyze the publications, such as statistical analysis in Excel to answer question 1 and 3 and citation analysis to see which disciplines are cited. The program VOSViewer was used to do a Keyword co-occurrence to answer question 4. The results showed that scientists who had published most research mainly came from either the USA, China, UK or South Africa. Furthermore, the articles about sustainable development had been cited in articles from mostly computer science, engineering and library & information science. The results showed also that WOS definition of library & information science is wide since the articles didn’t come from known LIS journals. Finally, there were a wide range of terms associated with sustainable development in the articles