Editorial: Special selection on bibliometrics and literature review

Citation

Chiu, D.K.W. and Ho, K.K.W. (2022), "Editorial: Special selection on bibliometrics and literature review", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 589-593. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-06-2022-510

First, we have to apologize for the long publication queue of Library Hi Tech, though Emerald has strived to publish accepted articles online first at a fantastic speed. To address this problem, we thank Emerald for gradually increasing our page budget from four issues to six issues per year. Further, we take the challenge of the long publishing queue to provide the opportunity of selecting and grouping articles of similar themes to a majority of upcoming issues to supplement guest-edited special issues. We write editorials to provide our readers with a better overview of the upcoming contemporary research in various fields covered by Library Hi Tech. We also use this venue to guide our readers to related articles recently published with us.

As for special issues, we found overwhelming responses from authors and readers on topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic (Huang et al., 2021, 2022). As our continuing efforts to combat the pandemic through knowledge sharing, we are revising a call-for-paper for Part III of the special issue. Please watch out for our upcoming announcement.

Bibliometrics and literature review are among the most popular topics in our regular and special issues. However, authors, please note that since our editorship, we avoid accepting bibliometrics and reviewing articles on areas not related to the core themes of Library Hi Tech to benefit our readers more. Continuing our topical selection in 39(4) on bibliometrics and literature review (Chiu and Ho, 2021), we present in this issue research findings in four areas as follows:

Research trends of library and information science (LIS) and related fields

Based on the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ranking of library and information science (LIS) journals, Alcaraz Martínez et al. (2022) studied the accessibility of the statistical charts published in the top ten LIS journals based on their impact factor. They discovered that most images do not follow the basic recommended accessibility guidelines. Problems like poor text alternatives, the insufficient contrast ratio between adjacent colors and the inexistence of customization options can be found. Chuang and Kuan (2022) also examined the impact of collaboration patterns, research productivity patterns and publication patterns for management information systems (MIS) research in Taiwan. They collected data from 1982 to 2015 from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) website, the JCR website, the Web of Science (WoS) website and Google Scholar and analyzed the data using power-law degree distribution, cumulative distribution function, weighted contribution score, exponential weighted moving average and network centrality score to visualize the MIS collaborations and research patterns in Taiwan. Their findings explained how the Taiwan Ministry of Education's evaluation policies affected MIS faculty members' collaboration and publication strategies. Nwankwo et al. (2022) also explored relative deprivation and implicit bias in LIS research publications on Africa and other continents. They used both web content analysis and surveys to collect data. They found that editors making fair and unbiased decisions as a policy was seen in 33% of the journals, which is relatively low. Readers may also be interested in Song et al. (2021), who explored the current law of aging in LIS and the impact of interdisciplinary citations on the aging of the discipline. Ding et al. (2021) analyzed the characteristics of knowledge diffusion of LIS from the perspective of citation. Wijewickrema (2022) also provided a LIS bibliometric study on literature from 2010 to 2019. Notably, Kim et al. (2021) studied the scientific profile and knowledge diffusion of this journal.

The last paper of this group is written by Loan et al. (2022). They used data collected from Google Scholar profiles to investigate whether authors play fair or manipulate Google Scholar bibliometric indicators, such as h-index and i10-index. They showed that the authors' h-index should not be approved at its face value, as the variations exist in the publication count and citations, which ultimately affect their h-index and i10-index. Readers interested in publication impact may also like to read about the analysis of Sci-Hub use with Google Trends by Behboudi et al. (2021). Chen et al. (2021) studied the effect of interdisciplinary components' citation intensity on scientific impact. Yang and Qi (2021) investigated whether proceedings papers in science fields have higher impacts than those in social science and humanities (SSH). Bedogni et al. (2022) further explored the correlation between the impact of scientific conferences and their venues.

Bibliometric and review studies on technologies and innovation

Amjad et al. (2022) designed a study to compare the citation advantage of open access and toll access articles from four subfields of computer science published by Springer and Elsevier from 2011 to 2015. They discovered that open access articles have a higher citation advantage than toll access articles across years and sub-domains. On the other hand, Shao et al. (2022) studied the evolutions and trends of artificial intelligence (AI) from four dimensions: research, output, influence and competition. They discovered that Pareto's principle applies to AI scholars' outputs, and the outputs have been increasing at an explosive rate in the past two decades. Beg et al. (2022) used a systematic literature review (SLR) to provide the viewpoint of privacy and security concerns mentioned in the current state-of-the-art mobile app recommendation domain. Readers may also be interested in a bibliometric review of cloud computing by Awan and Abbas (2022), Bitcoin by Shen et al. (2021), blockchain by Alam et al. (2022), 5th generation mobile communication technology by Farooqui et al. (2021), innovation convergence by Cui et al. (2022) and ecopreneurship by Guleria and Kaur (2021).

Yamada (2022) tried to find technologically important patent identification methods and indicators early and efficiently to grasp the technical qualitative level of patents, which are output indicators of research and development (R&D) results. The author suggested evaluating the qualitative importance of patients effectively and research should use both Heckman's analysis and discriminative indicators. Readers interested in patent research may also want to read Xiang et al. (2021) on the effects of intellectual property treaties on international innovation collaboration by analyzing patent record data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Janavi and Emami (2021) also investigated the co-citation of information security patents in the USPTO database. Lee (2021) used patent citation analysis to capture the trend of technological innovation associated with libraries. Also, Zhu (2020) proposed a self-organizing map neural network algorithm to quickly retrieve the same or similar patents in a large patent database.

Studies on education and culture

In this issue, we have two papers focused on education and culture. Ma et al. (2022) studied intelligent education research using the core collection data of the WoS. They discovered that intelligent education research had been widely carried out in countries worldwide. Readers may also be interested in the bibliometric analysis of Chen et al. (2019) on urban education. In addition, we are currently preparing for a special issue on “Contemporary Learning behaviors on mobile devices and social media,” and interested readers and researchers, please consider submitting your manuscripts related to this special issue for peer review.

Yun et al. (2022) studied the prominent topics, the distribution and association characteristics of topics and the topic evolutionary trends of documentary heritage preservation and conservation (DHPAC) research in China. They discovered that the research topics of DHPAC research in China were unbalanced but distinct. Readers may also be interested in the bibliometric analysis of Feng et al. (2022) on cultural and creative design in China.

Studies on science research

Mohan and Kumbar (2022) investigated the present status of planetary science research in India. They noted that India's publications on planetary science research have increased over time, with an annual growth rate of 9.66%, and the USA was the primary collaborator with India. Readers may also be interested in Mahala and Singh (2021), who traced the science research output of top Indian universities from 2015 to 2019. Yang and Qi (2020) compared the impacts of proceedings papers in the fields of social SSH and science. Doulani (2021) analyzed the science research publications of Alzahra University from 1986 to 2019.

The last paper, Şahin and Yılmaz (2022), studied the evolution and trends of local food research using the WoS database from 1970 to 2020 using CiteSpace II software. They highlighted emerging research themes; collaborations such as authors, institutions, journals and co-citations such as documents, authors and journals. Readers may also be interested in Hsiao and Chen (2021) about the continuance intention to use a food-ordering chatbot. Notably, CiteSpace is a common tool used by Song et al. (2020) for analyzing LIS research articles, Zhao et al. (2021) for psychological processing of contextual cues, Liu and Li (2021) for land use and carbon emissions and Feng et al. (2022) for cultural and creative design.