Information analysis of Foundation of Information Science (FIS) information exchange

Quantitative analysis of messages from the Foundations of Information Science (FIS) mailing list posted from between 6 December 1997 and 29 November 2016. Messages, their authors and dates are taken from the official FIS website. Messages are classified according to the main topics of discussion, through the analysis of the titles, in order to identify the main authors and topics discussed over the years. Then, the textual analysis of the messages of each topic is carried out to determine the specific vocabulary of each subject. The results show that the discussions are, in general, multidisciplinary, with topics independent of each other. The most discussed topics were “Information and Physics” and “Definition of Information” and the top 10 authors participated, on average, in 72% (23 of 32) of the topics.