An Identification of the Image Retrieval Domain from the Perspective of Library and Information Science with Author Co-citation and Author Bibliographic Coupling Analyses

As the improvement of digital technologies increases the use of images from various fields, the domain of image retrieval has evolved and become a growing topic of research in the Library and Information Science field. The purpose of this study is to identify the knowledge structure of the image retrieval domain by using the author co-citation analysis and author bibliographic coupling as analytical tools in order to understand the domain’s past and present. The data set for this study is 245 articles with 8,031 cited articles in the field of image retrieval from 1998 to 2013, from the Web of Science citation database. According to the results of author co-citation analysis for the past of the image retrieval domain, our findings demonstrate that the intellectual structure of image retrieval in the LIS field consists of predominantly user-oriented approaches, but also includes some areas influenced by the CBIR area. More specifically, the user-oriented approach contains six specific areas which include image needs, information seeking, image needs and search behavior, image indexing and access, indexing of image collection, and web image search. On the other hand, for CBIR approaches, it contains feature-based image indexing, shape-based indexing, and IR & CBIR. The recent trends of image retrieval based on the results from author bibliographic coupling analysis show that the domain is expanding to emerging areas of medical images, multimedia, ontology- and tag-based indexing which thus reflects a new paradigm of information environment