The impact of library and information science knowledge from the perspective of external citations

Purpose This paper aims to explore the characteristics of knowledge diffusion in library and information science (LIS) to reveal the impact of knowledge in LIS on other disciplines and the disciplinary status of LIS. Design/methodology/approach Taking the 573 highly cited papers (HCP) of LIS during the years 2000–2019 in Web of Science and 85,638 papers citing them from non-LIS disciplines as the analysis object, this paper analysed the disciplines to which the citing papers belonged regarding the Biglan model, and the topics and their characteristics of the citing disciplines using latent Dirichlet allocation topic clustering. Findings The results showed that the knowledge in LIS was exported to multiple disciplines and topics. (1) Citations from other disciplines were overall increasing, and the main citing disciplines, mainly from applied science disciplines, were medicine, computer science, management, economics, education, sociology, psychology, journalism and communication, earth science, engineering, biology, political science, chemistry and agronomy. However, those disciplines had fewer citations to LIS during for the years from 2000 to 2004, with rapid growth in the next three time periods. (2) The citing papers had various topics and showed an increasing trend in quantity. Moreover, topics of different disciplines from 2000 to 2019 had various characteristics. Originality/value From the perspective of discipline and topic, this study analyses papers citing the HCP of LIS from non-LIS disciplines, revealing the impact of knowledge in LIS on other disciplines.