PurposeThe paper analyses the research in Library and Information Science (LIS) in 2025 and the evolution of LIS research longitudinally from 1965 to 2025. Design/methodology/approachThe study employs a quantitative intellectual content analysis of articles published in ∼30 scholarly LIS journals, following the design by Jarvelin and Vakkari (2022). In content analysis, articles are classified using a multi-dimensional faceted classification covering topical content and methodology. The classification schedules and the journal set are held stable through the years. The classification serves as an explicit definition of the scope of LIS. FindingsThe study indicates that the trend of diminishing focus in LIS on Library and information (L&I) services has accelerated, while scientific and professional communication (S&PC) has become the most popular topic. Information storage and retrieval (IS&R) has lost its earlier strong position toward the end of the analysed period. LIS research is methodologically increasingly varied since survey, scientometric methods, experiment, case studies and qualitative studies have all gained in popularity. Consequently, LIS may have become over the years more versatile in the analysis of its research objects. As concrete evidence of change, in all 41% of top-journal articles fell outside LIS topics in 2025. This reflects changing research paradigms and publisher interest. Originality/valueAmong quantitative intellectual content analyses of LIS research, the study is unique in its scope: length of analysis period (60 years); width (5 dimensions covering topical content and methodology) and depth (the annual batch of ∼30 scholarly journals).

Introduction. We investigated the effects of domain knowledge (DK) and prompting skills by leveraging a traditional search engine and a prompt-based LLM chatbot for a learning-oriented creative task. Method. On a simulated curated calligraphy exhibition task for which one must integrate DK and creativity to write summaries of curatorial planning, we observed behavior when using the NPM Collection, Google Search, and ChatGPT. We assessed the creative thinking demonstrated in the final summaries. User perception of tools supporting creative thinking was evaluated by the creativity support index. Analysis. We analysed information source usage behavior using descriptive statistical analysis and significance testing and used regression analysis to examine the predictive power of tool usage behavior, domain knowledge, and prompting skills for summary writing. Results. We discovered a positive predictive effect of DK and ChatGPT usage on the quality of curatorial planning summaries. Better prompting skills enhanced task performance and perceived creativity. For creative thinking, Google seemed to better foster exploration than ChatGPT. Conclusions. Prompt-based LLM chatbots support learning-oriented creative tasks. As prompting skills are essential, prompting should be integrated into information literacy education. The study provides implications for the design of search systems in human-information retrieval-LLM interaction to better support creative tasks.

The paper looks at the methodology of empirical analyses of the content and structure of Information Science (IS). The traditional approach in empirical analysis is intellectual content analysis (ICA) of a representative data set. The high labor cost prohibits the analysis of massive data sets. A recent alternative is based on data mining/machine learning. Its strength is the capability of analyzing massive datasets efficiently. However, a significant issue is the quality of content analysis. The paper compares latent Dirichlet allocation/topic modeling (LDA/TM) based statistical analysis to ICA using the same data set, 1514 scholarly articles from the year 2015 volumes of 30 IS journals. The intellectual analysis provides the mirror for reflecting the TM results. LDA/TM is strong in identifying new directions of a discipline and processing masses of text. Its weaknesses include semantic haziness of topics due to bag-of-words article representation, text pre-processing, tuning of parameters, and being unanalytic in composing topics from words belonging to different categories.

Se lleva a cabo un ejercicio de evaluación en el contexto de la biblioteconomía internacional comparativa analizando los sistemas de bibliotecas públicas de España y Finlandia. El análisis se basa en los indicadores de esfuerzo en presupuesto, préstamos y visitas a nivel de comunidades autónomas (España) y regiones (Finlandia) entre 2010 y 2023. Los resultados permiten concluir que Finlandia cuenta con un sistema de bibliotecas uniforme y homogéneo, mientras que en España la situación es más variable y heterogénea. Estas conclusiones se ponen en relación con el hecho de que Finlandia cuenta con una ley de bibliotecas a nivel de país, mientras que España no. Se contextualizan los resultados para cada caso profundizando en aspectos clave y se plantea la cuestión de si en España sería posible, preferible y/o efectiva una ley a nivel de estado que regule la provisión de recursos para bibliotecas públicas según criterios como los que se marcan en Finlandia.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to find out which research topics and methods in information science (IS) articles are used in other disciplines as indicated by citations.Design/methodology/approachThe study analyzes citations to articles in IS published in 31 scholarly IS journals in 2015. The study employs content analysis of articles published in 2015 receiving citations from publication venues representing IS and other disciplines in the citation window 2015–2021. The unit of analysis is the article-citing discipline pair. The data set consists of 1178 IS articles cited altogether 25 K times through 5 K publication venues. Each citation is seen as a contribution to the citing document’s discipline by the cited article, which represents some IS subareas and methodologies, and the author team's disciplinary composition, which is inferred from the authors’ affiliations.FindingsThe results show that the citation profiles of disciplines vary depending on research topics, methods and author disciplines. Disciplines external to IS are typically cited in IS articles authored by scholars with the same background. Thus, the export of ideas from IS to other disciplines is evidently smaller than the earlier findings claim. IS should not be credited for contributions by other disciplines published in IS literature.Originality/valueThis study is the first to analyze which research topics and methods in the articles of IS are of use in other disciplines as indicated by citations.

The paper analyzes the citation impact of Library and Information Science (LIS) research articles published in 31 leading international LIS journals in 2015. The main research question is: to what degree do authors’ disciplinary composition in association with topic, methodology, and type of contribution affect their citation impact? The impact is analyzed in terms of the number of citations received and their authority, using outlier normalization and subfield normalization. Quantitative content analysis is used to analyze article characteristics including topic, methodology, type of contribution, and the disciplinary composition of their author teams. The citations received by the articles are traced from 2015 to May 2021. Citing document authority is measured by the citations they had received up to May 2021. The overall finding was that authors’ disciplinary composition is significantly associated with citation scores. The differences in citation scores between disciplinary compositions appeared typically within information retrieval and scientific communication. In both topics LIS and computer science jointly received significantly higher citation scores than many disciplines like LIS alone or humanities in information retrieval; or natural sciences, medicine, or social sciences alone in scientific communication. The paper is original in reporting a joint analysis of content characteristics, authorship composition, and impact.

Purpose Recent studies on search-as-learning (SAL) have recognized the significance of identifying users' learning needs as they evolve for acquiring knowledge during the search process. In this study, the authors clarify the extent to which search behaviors reflect the learning outcome and foster the users' knowledge of Chinese art. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted an exploratory-sequential mixed-methods approach using simulated work task situations to collect empirical data. The authors used two types of simulated learning tasks for topics related to painting and antique knowledge. A lot of 25 users participated in this evaluation of digital archives (DAs) at the National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taiwan. For each set of topics, a close-ended task related to lower-level learning goals and an open-ended task related to higher-level learning goals. Findings The learning criteria reflect changes in the users' knowledge structure, revealing the SAL process. Furthermore, users achieved better task performance on the higher-level creative-learning task, which suggests that they met more learning criteria, exhibited a greater variety of search patterns when exploring the topics via interaction with various sources. Finally, there is a close relationship between creative-learning tasks, prior knowledge, keyword search actions and learning outcomes. Originality/value The authors discuss implications with respect to the design of DAs in practice and contributions to the body of SAL knowledge in DAs of online museums. For future reference, the authors provide implications for the development of learning measures from the perspective of user search behavior with associated learning outcomes in the context of DAs.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to characterize library and information science (LIS) as fragmenting discipline both historically and by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory about the organization of sciences and Fuchs’ (1993) theory about scientific change. Design/methodology/approach The study combines historical source analysis with conceptual and theoretical analysis for characterizing LIS. An attempt is made to empirically validate the distinction between LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies. Findings The origin of fragmentation in LIS due the contributions of other disciplines can be traced in the 1960s and 1970s for solving the problems produced by the growth of scientific literature. Computer science and business established academic programs and started research relevant to LIS community focusing on information retrieval and bibliometrics. This has led to differing research interests between LIS and other disciplines concerning research topics and methods. LIS has been characterized as fragmented adhocracy as a whole, but we make a distinction between research topics LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies. Originality/value The paper provides an elaborated historical perspective on the fragmentation of LIS in the pressure of other disciplines. It also characterizes LIS as discipline in a fresh way by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory.

The paper reports a longitudinal analysis of the topical and methodological development of Library and Information Science (LIS). Its focus is on the effects of researchers' disciplines on these developments. The study extends an earlier cross‐sectional study (Vakkari et al., Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2022a, 73, 1706–1722) by a coordinated dataset representing a content analysis of articles published in 31 scholarly LIS journals in 1995, 2005, and 2015. It is novel in its coverage of authors' disciplines, topical and methodological aspects in a coordinated dataset spanning two decades thus allowing trend analysis. The findings include a shrinking trend in the share of LIS from 67 to 36% while Computer Science, and Business and Economics increase their share from 9 and 6% to 21 and 16%, respectively. The earlier cross‐sectional study (Vakkari et al., Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2022a, 73, 1706–1722) for the year 2015 identified three topical clusters of LIS research, focusing on topical subfields, methodologies, and contributing disciplines. Correspondence analysis confirms their existence already in 1995 and traces their development through the decades. The contributing disciplines infuse their concepts, research questions, and approaches to LIS and may also subsume vital parts of LIS in their own structures of knowledge production.

Many would agree that the institutional library/information service R&D, information seeking, information retrieval, and biblio/infor/scientometrics form the landscape of Library and Information Science (LIS). These subareas are also brought forward in introductions to, and analyses of LIS (e.g., curricula, lectures, textbooks). Still, scholars contributing to different subareas may increasingly turn their attention toward the territory outside LIS – and be integrated there – or remain as visitors to LIS, being based outside. Are there indications toward that in LIS research? We decided to analyze the trends.

Although increased attention is being given to understanding how people search to build task outcomes, a formal model of the relation between how people search and how people build task outcomes is still lacking. This paper proposes a unified probabilistic model of how people search to build outcomes. The model involves 3 types of searcher behaviors (i.e., query submission, document selection, and information transformation) to model the effect of the information collected during search, and uses the item response theory to capture the ternary relations between the ability to transform information, the information collected, and the probability of successfully building task outcomes. We evaluate the proposed model in the task of identifying searchers' proficiencies under the assumption that high proficiency searchers would have high abilities to transform information. The results obtained high accuracies and F1 scores, which could reflect the effectiveness of the proposed model. The model contributes to the formal understanding of how people search to build task outcomes, and provides new possibilities for personalized and session-based information retrieval research.

This paper seeks to analyze information search process in complex tasks1. Complex tasks are larger tasks, which lead people to engage in search tasks for finding information to advance those tasks. Search process consists of activities from query formulation to working with sources selected for task outcome. This paper approaches task performance from the cognitive point of view conceptualizing it as changes in knowledge structures. These structures consist of concepts and their relations representing some phenomenon. Changes in knowledge structures are associated to query formulation and search tactics, selecting contributing sources and working with sources for creating task outcome. As a result, hypotheses concerning associations between changes in knowledge structures and search behaviors are suggested. The paper also presents some ideas for success indicators at various stages of search processes.

People do not search information as such but seek to get a job done or to manage a situation by the help of search results. Therefore, the ultimate goal of information search is to advance task performance. It should be evaluated accordingly, i.e. by its contribution to task outcome. This implies an extended notion of search process, which also covers the use of information in search results for task outcome. For measuring the effect of search to task outcome we propose both indirect and direct indicators which measure search success.

The paper reports a longitudinal analysis of the topical and methodological development of Library and Information Science (LIS). Its focus is on the effects of researchers' disciplines on these developments. The study extends an earlier cross-sectional study (Vakkari et al., Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2022a, 73, 1706–1722) by a coordinated dataset representing a content analysis of articles published in 31 scholarly LIS journals in 1995, 2005, and 2015. It is novel in its coverage of authors' disciplines, topical and methodological aspects in a coordinated dataset spanning two decades thus allowing trend analysis. The findings include a shrinking trend in the share of LIS from 67 to 36% while Computer Science, and Business and Economics increase their share from 9 and 6% to 21 and 16%, respectively. The earlier cross-sectional study (Vakkari et al., Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2022a, 73, 1706–1722) for the year 2015 identified three topical clusters of LIS research, focusing on topical subfields, methodologies, and contributing disciplines. Correspondence analysis confirms their existence already in 1995 and traces their development through the decades. The contributing disciplines infuse their concepts, research questions, and approaches to LIS and may also subsume vital parts of LIS in their own structures of knowledge production.

The paper analyses Library and Information Science (LIS) articles published in leading international LIS journals based on their authors’ disciplinary backgrounds. The study combines content analysis of articles with authors’ affiliation analysis. The main research question is: Are authors’ disciplinary backgrounds associated with choice of research topics and methods in LIS articles? The study employs a quantitative content analysis of articles published in 30 + scholarly LIS journals in 2015, focusing on research topics and methods. The articles are also assigned to three disciplinary categories based on authors’ affiliations: External (no authors from LIS institutions), Internal (all authors from LIS institutions), and Mixed (some authors from LIS institutions, some from outside). The association of articles’ disciplinary categories with article research topics and methods is analysed quantitatively. Most research contributions to LIS come from external articles (57%). However, LIS scholars have a clear majority in research on L&I services and institutions (68%), while external scholars dominate the contributions in Information retrieval (73%) and Scientific communication (Scientometrics, 69%). Internal articles tend to have an intermediary’s (29%) or end-user’s (22%) viewpoint on information dissemination while the external ones have developer’s viewpoint (27%) or no dissemination viewpoint (49%). Among research strategies, survey (29%) and concept analysis (23%) dominate internal articles, survey (28%) and citation analysis (19%) dominate mixed articles, and survey (20%) and citation analysis (19%) dominate external articles. The application profiles of research strategies varied somewhat between disciplinary categories and main topics. Consequently, the development of LIS in the areas of Information retrieval, Information seeking, and Scientific communication seems highly dependent on the contribution of other disciplines. As a small discipline, LIS may have difficulties in responding to the challenges of other disciplines interested in research questions in these three areas.

The study analyses contributions to Library and Information Science (LIS) by researchers representing various disciplines. How are such contributions associated with the choice of research topics and methodology? The study employs a quantitative content analysis of articles published in 31 scholarly LIS journals in 2015. Each article is seen as a contribution to LIS by the authors' disciplines, which are inferred from their affiliations. The unit of analysis is the article-discipline pair. Of the contribution instances, the share of LIS is one third. Computer Science contributes one fifth and Business and Economics one sixth. The latter disciplines dominate the contributions in information retrieval, information seeking, and scientific communication indicating strong influences in LIS. Correspondence analysis reveals three clusters of research, one focusing on traditional LIS with contributions from LIS and Humanities and survey-type research; another on information retrieval with contributions from Computer Science and experimental research; and the third on scientific communication with contributions from Natural Sciences and Medicine and citation analytic research. The strong differentiation of scholarly contributions in LIS hints to the fragmentation of LIS as a discipline.

Purpose This paper analyses the research in Library and Information Science (LIS) and reports on (1) the status of LIS research in 2015 and (2) on the evolution of LIS research longitudinally from 1965 to 2015. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a quantitative intellectual content analysis of articles published in 30+ scholarly LIS journals, following the design by Tuomaala et al. (2014). In the content analysis, we classify articles along eight dimensions covering topical content and methodology. Findings The topical findings indicate that the earlier strong LIS emphasis on L&I services has declined notably, while scientific and professional communication has become the most popular topic. Information storage and retrieval has given up its earlier strong position towards the end of the years analyzed. Individuals are increasingly the units of observation. End-user's and developer's viewpoints have strengthened at the cost of intermediaries' viewpoint. LIS research is methodologically increasingly scattered since survey, scientometric methods, experiment, case studies and qualitative studies have all gained in popularity. Consequently, LIS may have become more versatile in the analysis of its research objects during the years analyzed. Originality/value Among quantitative intellectual content analyses of LIS research, the study is unique in its scope: length of analysis period (50 years), width (8 dimensions covering topical content and methodology) and depth (the annual batch of 30+ scholarly journals).

The study analyses contributions to Library and Information Science (LIS) by researchers representing various disciplines. How are such contributions associated with the choice of research topics and methodology? The study employs a quantitative content analysis of articles published in 31 scholarly LIS journals in 2015. Each article is seen as a contribution to LIS by the authors' disciplines, which are inferred from their affiliations. The unit of analysis is the article‐discipline pair. Of the contribution instances, the share of LIS is one third. Computer Science contributes one fifth and Business and Economics one sixth. The latter disciplines dominate the contributions in information retrieval, information seeking, and scientific communication indicating strong influences in LIS. Correspondence analysis reveals three clusters of research, one focusing on traditional LIS with contributions from LIS and Humanities and survey‐type research; another on information retrieval with contributions from Computer Science and experimental research; and the third on scientific communication with contributions from Natural Sciences and Medicine and citation analytic research. The strong differentiation of scholarly contributions in LIS hints to the fragmentation of LIS as a discipline.