Impact and Relevance of LIS Journals: A Scientometric Analysis of International and German-Language LIS Journals—Citation Analysis Versus Reader Survey

The goal of the scientometric analysis presented in this article was to investigate international and regional (i.e., German-language) periodicals in the field of library and information science (LIS). This was done by means of a citation analysis and a reader survey. For the citation analysis, impact factor, citing half-life, number of references per article, and the rate of self-references of a periodical were used as indicators. In addition, the leading LIS periodicals were mapped. For the 40 international periodicals, data were collected from ISI’s Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports (JCR); the citations of the 10 German-language journals were counted manually (overall 1,494 source articles with 10,520 citations). Altogether, the empirical base of the citation analysis consisted of nearly 90,000 citations in 6,203 source articles that were published between 1997 and 2000. The expert survey investigated reading frequency, applicability of the journals to the job of the reader, publication frequency, and publication preference both for all respondents and for different groups among them (practitioners vs. scientists, librarians vs. documentalists vs. LIS scholars, public sector vs. information industry vs. other private company employees). The study was conducted in spring 2002. A total of 257 questionnaires were returned by information specialists from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Having both citation and readership data, we performed a comparative analysis of these two data sets. This enabled us to identify answers to questions like: Does reading behavior correlate with the journal impact factor? Do readers prefer journals with a short or a long half-life, or with a low or a high number of references? Is there any difference in this matter among librarians, documentalists, and LIS scholars?