Forecasting the future of library and information science and its sub-fields

Global research hotspots and trends on microplastics: a bibliometric analysis

In recent years, microplastics have become an integral part of the terrestrial and aquatic environments, which is one of the major concerns of communities around the world. Therefore, it is necessary to know the current status of studies and feasible potentials in the future. This study, conducted an in-depth bibliometric analysis of publications from 1990 to 2022 to present the influential countries, authors, institutes, papers, and journals on microplastics. Findings reveal that there has been a steady increase in microplastic publications and citations in recent years. And, the number of publications and citations has increased 19 and 35 times since 2015. Besides, we performed a comprehensive keyword analysis to show the significant keywords and clusters in this field. In particular, this study used the TF-IDF method as a text-mining analysis to extract the new keywords used in recent years (i.e., 2020-2022). New keywords can draw the attention of scholars to important issues and provide a basis for future research directions.

Visualizing the intellectual structure and evolution of carbon neutrality research: a bibliometric analysis

Carbon neutrality is a research hotspot and achieves increasing interests in recent years. In this paper, utilizing the Web of Science database as the data resource, we conduct a series of analyses for the carbon neutrality-related literature from the past decade based on CiteSpace, including the visualization analysis for the research hotspots and trends, discovery of intellectual structure and influential directions, as well as the cooperation analysis for representative researchers, organizations, and countries. The findings demonstrate that (a) the relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth has achieved increasing academic interests in recent years. (b) There are mainly four knowledge groups at present in this area including renewable energy and carbon emissions; international energy cooperation and investment; energy regulations and policies of different countries; technological innovation and economic growth. (c) Cooperations exist widely within various authors, institutions, as well as countries, with academic clusters developed towards the goals of energy transitions, environmental sustainability, city development, etc.

COVID-19 and the scientific publishing system: growth, open access and scientific fields

We model the growth of scientific literature related to COVID-19 and forecast the expected growth from 1 June 2021. Considering the significant scientific and financial efforts made by the research community to find solutions to end the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented volume of scientific outputs is being produced. This questions the capacity of scientists, politicians and citizens to maintain infrastructure, digest content and take scientifically informed decisions. A crucial aspect is to make predictions to prepare for such a large corpus of scientific literature. Here we base our predictions on the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and exponential smoothing models using the Dimensions database. This source has the particularity of including in the metadata information on the date in which papers were indexed. We present global predictions, plus predictions in three specific settings: by type of access (Open Access), by domain-specific repository (SSRN and MedRxiv) and by several research fields. We conclude by discussing our findings.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-022-04536-x.

Trends and focuses of hantavirus researches: a global bibliometric analysis and visualization from 1980 to 2020

Background

There have been worldwide changes in the researches on hantaviruses in the past several decades. Nevertheless, there are few bibliometric analysis studies this field. We aim to evaluate and visualize the research focuses and trends of this field using a bibliometric analysis way to help understand the developmet and future hotspots of this field.

Material and methods

Publications related to hantavirus studies were culled from the Web of Science Core Collection to generate trend analysis. The articles and reviews were re-extracted and Countries, institutions, authors, references and keywords in this field were visually analyzed by using VOSviewer and CiteSpace.

Results

A total of 4408 studies were included and the number of publications regarding hantaviruses significantly increased yearly. Three thousand seven hundred sixteen research articles and reviews were retrieved to generate bibliometric analysis. These studies mainly come from 125 countries led by USA and China and 3312 institutions led by the University of Helsinki. Twelve thousand five hundred twenty nine authors were identified and Vaheri A were the most influential author. Journal of Virology was the journal with the most studies and citations. After analysis, Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, nephropathia epidemica and related genotypes, clinical symptoms and rodents were the most common keywords and developing areas.

Conclusion

Research on hantavirus is flourishing. Cooperation among different countries and institutions in this field must be strengthened in the future. The ecology and clinical symptoms of new genotypes, the vaccine development and factors that affect host population distribution and density are current and developing areas of study.

Exploring COVID-19 research papers published on journals in the field of LIS

As the COVID-19 pandemic prevails, research related to COVID-19 has spread beyond medicine, health science, and biology to almost all academic fields. Library and information science is one of the most active fields that publish COVID-19-related research papers. This study examined 696 research papers related to COVID-19 whose journal being categorized as “information science & library science” by Web of Science. The result of bibliometric analysis showed that the publications were active and on the rise. Most papers were published in English and produced in the United States. According to the keyword clustering map produced by semantic network analysis, two fields, bibliometrics and health communication, were publishing research papers related to COVID-19 most actively. Moreover, the most productive journal was a library and information science journal focusing on health informatics. Additionally, a tendency was found that researchers preferred to publish on journals with high impact factors. Compared with non-COVID-19-related research papers, there was a significant decrease of “time for acceptance” of COVID-19-related papers, and the proportion of open access was relatively high. Confronting the global crisis of COVID-19, the library and information science field also made efforts and challenges to resolve the slow peer-review, delayed publishing, and high paywalls, which have been recognized as a “chronic diseases” of the academic publishing ecosystem. It is expected that these endeavors can serve as a turning point to reconsider and innovate the traditional research-publishing lifecycle.

Factors affecting time to publication in information science

Publication speed is one of the important aspects of scholarly communication since various research performance evaluation systems are based mostly on published papers. This study aims to reveal the factors affecting the publication speed of journals. In this context, six information science journals: ASLIB Journal of Information Management, Journal of Documentation, Journal of Informetrics, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Online Information Review, and Scientometrics are analysed in terms of time to publication (from submission to decision). Our results show that publication time is significantly shorter when an editorial board member or a productive author of a given journal is one of the authors, in compare with the articles. submitted by other authors. The number of authors has a time-prolonging effect on publication time, as expected. On the other hand, publications with more citations were accepted in a shorter time. The papers with authors from central countries and high-income countries have an advantage of shorter publication time. Thus, this study shows that researchers who publish papers with popular and successful researchers from central countries have the advantage of the speed of publication which may have substantial effects on the future academic work, especially of early career researchers.