Locating Information science: Changes in Ph.D. dissertations during the past three decades

The purpose of this study is to locate information science among other disciplines to see if there has been a unique position for information science by data from the Dissertation Abstracts database and to suggest a direction for the current curriculum reformation in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools. This study, with data from the Dissertation Abstracts database by UMI, shows the changes of information science's relative location to other disciplines. Descriptive statistics, multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis, and clustering analysis were executed with the co-subject terms for the selected records from the database. It turns out that information science has kept its unique position in the intellectual space throughout the past three decades. It raises a question about the name of Library and Information Science because these two disciplines consistently have had a certain distance during that time period. As seen in many Library and Information Science schools, the separate sub-tracks (like information science vs. library science) show a parallel between two disciplines. In addition, the prevalent assumption of library science as a sub-discipline under information science cannot be supported by the data in this study.