No 2 2005 vol 7

ISSN 0284-3536
Inforsk, Department of Sociology, Umeå Universitet, SE- 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Tel: +46-90-786 56 98
E-mail: olle.persson@soc.umu.se

Olle Persson and Fredrik Åström

Introduction
Ranking of academic institutions by papers and citations has become fashionable within almost every field of science. The field of Library and Information Science (LIS), in which the bibliometric indicators have been developed and refined, is no exception (Persson 1994, White & McCain 1998). In this ranking exercise we have adopted a somewhat novel approach by limiting the citing and cited papers to a given set of journals, in order to be able to control for self citing institutions and authors. This is usually overlooked since it requires some extra programming effort to compare the citing and cited papers before adding up the citations. In this study all self citations are excluded and the final citation count is based on the number of times a paper in the journal set has been cited by the other papers in the same set of journals. If a given paper cites several papers by the same author or institution all these citations are counted, since we assume that cited actors have different weights for the citing paper.

Data
Genuine articles from the following 27 LIS journals were downloaded from Web of Science (1990-2005 April). Number of papers in paranthesis:

Aslib Proceedings (557), College & Research Libraries (529), Electronic Library (566), Information Processing & Management (755), Information Technology and Libraries (399), Interlending & Document Supply (289), Journal of Academic Librarianship (696), Journal of Documentation (309), Journal of Information Ethics (132), Journal of Information Science (617), Journal of Librarianship (10), Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (226), Journal of Scholarly Publishing (212), Journal of the American Society for Information Science (873), Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (426), Knowledge Organization (186), Library & Information Science Research (260), Library Collections Acquisitions & Technical Services (204), Library Journal (1739), Library Quarterly (186), Library Resources & Technical Services (314), Library Trends (635), Libri (381), Online (940), Online Information Review (198), Research Evaluation (87), Scientometrics (1191).

Citation links among the articles were created using Bibexcel. The main organization of each author address was extracted. Self citations for institutions and authors were eliminated in cases where the set of citing and cited institutions/authors overlapped. This is identical to Glänzel et al (2004): "self-citation occurs whenever the set of co-authors of the citing paper and that of the cited one are not disjoint, that is, if these sets share at least one author."

Results
In all three citing periods papers from Indiana university received the highest number of citations. With few exceptions North American universities dominate the top ranks in all periods. However, during the most recent citing period, 2001-2004, the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark (RSLIS) is in third place just behind Indiana and Rutgers, while Sheffield University is ranked fifth and Leiden university ranked 6th. European universities are becoming stronger in the field. It should be pointed out that the total citation impact is only weakly related to number of papers published.

In contrast to the most cited institutions, there are several Europeans among the most cited authors, many of them specializing in bibliometrics. During the most recent period the three top names are from the broader LIS field, with Peter Ingwersen from RSLIS at the top. Ingwersen is prominent in informetrics as well as in information retrieval research.

Table 1. Most cited universities and authors in Libaray and Information Science
Note: Numbers refer to number of citations, self-citations excluded

Discussion
Europe is apparently on the move in Library and Information Science as shown by the citation impact of both institutions and authors. From a Nordic perspective, to have one institution and one scholar at the top of the ranks is quite extraordinary. The impact of the Danish LIS school is strong and global and is based on a series of good results in informetrics, information retrieval as well as knowledge organization. With such a broad profile they could be expected to keep the leading role during the coming years.

References

Glanzel, W., Thijs, B., & Schlemmer, B. (2004). A bibliometric approach to the role of author self-citations in scientific communication. Scientometrics, 59(1), 63-77.

Persson, O. (1994). The Intellectual Base and Research Fronts of Jasis 1986-1990. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45(1), 31-38.

White, H. D., & McCain, K. W. (1998). Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972-1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(4), 327-355.