Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
1-2022
Abstract
Objectives of the study: The paper is about evaluating the bibliometric parameters of the documents published in the prominent journal, “Public Library Quarterly” (PLQ) from 1979 to 2021.
Research Design: The dataset for this retrospective study was retrieved from the Scopus database. The bibliographic information of all kinds of documents was downloaded in the Comma Separated Value (CSV) file, further converted into Microsoft Excel for analysis. The bibliometric indicators of publications and citations by years, authorship pattern, most contributing countries, productive authors, frequently used keywords and salient appearances of highly cited were examined. Microsoft Excel, VOSviewer and Biblioshiney software were applied to visualize the data. The dataset is limited to papers of PLQ that were indexed in the Scopus data.
Key Findings: A total of 1151 documents were found and about 78% were contributed by a single author pattern. The multi-author papers gained a higher citation impact. The analysis of data witnessed that a visible shift from single-author to multi-author was observed and the number of papers was also increased from 2011 to 2021. The majority of papers was fall in the category of articles, followed by editorials. Waters R. L. and United States were found to be the most productive author and the most contributing country, respectively. The “public libraries” and “public library” were the most used keywords. More than one-fifth of the citations were gained by the 15 highly-cited papers.
Conclusion: PLQ has been playing a leadership in the research of public libraries around the world. The public library system in the United States has been the role model for the rest of the world because more than three-fourth of the literature of PLQ was contributed by the United States.