Scientific collaboration kartläggning av ett tvärvetenskapligt forskningsområde inom biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to map the research area of scientific collaboration within Library and Information Science LIS. The purpose is to find out who is doing research in this area, who they cite and if they get cited by other scientists outside of LIS. Scientific collaboration is an interdisciplinary research area with researchers from different disciplines such as LIS, human-computer interaction, psychology and sociology. We have concentrated our study to North America, Ireland, Great Britain and Scandinavia. In order to find researchers, we visited the websites of all universities with library and information science faculties in the chosen countries. Once the researchers were found, we tried to find their work trough databases and the Internet. We found 16 researchers and 42 works. Most of the scientists came from the USA, and had PhDs in Library and Information Science. We analyzed the works references and tried to establish connections between the researchers and articles using citation analysis. To find out if they got cited by others, we used the database ISI Web of Science. 27 of the works were cited outside the LIS/scientific collaboration group. The result indicates that the researchers cite each other. However, they mostly cite researchers from other disciplines other than LIS. This displays the interdisciplinary nature of the research area. Also, scientific collaboration seems to be known outside of this discipline. We hope our study will be of help to anyone who wants an overview of this research area.