Growth and aging study on literatures of information science & library science based on SSCI data

Abstract

Both in theory and in practice, Library and Information Science (LIS) are exhibiting a high trend of development. In this work, the growth and aging of literature are applied to make a historical and comprehensive statistical analysis of LIS. A total of 138,658 records spanning 122 years were taken from the SSCI database. The growth and aging curves of LIS have been drawn, supplementing with the driving forces of countries, institutions, and authors to explore the current production situation in the LIS field. According to the findings of this study, Price’s exponential development curve is followed by the increase of literature in LIS. The second phase mentioned by Price, constant exponential growth, is where LIS is right now. It is possible to forecast that LIS will continue to grow exponentially and will eventually become more mature. Based on the Price Index in the LIS discipline, which was roughly 0.348 in 2022, researchers frequently cite new literature. Since LIS is rapidly aging, knowledge updates happen more frequently, which is consistent with the development stage of the LIS discipline. Countries, institutions and authors all exhibit strong power-law distributions in terms of the driving forces. In the field of LIS, the United States is unquestionably the leader. Despite having a relatively late start, China has made rapid progress in the field of LIS, with Wuhan University gaining prominence in the last 3 years, which deserves attention.