2022 VOLUME 2 ISSUE 3
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Detecting the research diversity of researchers in library and information science: An exploratory study
AUTHOR
Yuehua Zhao, Sicheng Zhu, Jie Wu, Hao Wang, Sanhong Deng
ABSTRACT
Metrics have emerged as an important tool for quantitatively evaluating researchers from a variety of perspectives, including research impact, research quality, interdisciplinarity, and cross-disciplinarity. Especially in the field of library and information science, many previous studies have highlighted the characteristics of researchers in this field. However, only a minority of the studies address the aspect of diversity in research topics. The purpose of this study is to (1) evaluate the topic diversity of researchers in library and information science and (2) examine the relationships between the researcher topic diversity and research impact. We propose an indicator to quantify author topic diversity, which we refer to as author topic diversity (ATD). Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to detect topics in the field, while cosine similarity is used to calculate the diversity of research topics in a given researcher's publications. The results show that topic diversity in the field of library and information science varies greatly from author to author. In addition, weak positive correlations are found between the ATD and citation indicators, suggesting that engaging in diversified topics may lead to higher research impact.
KEYWORDS
Research diversity; Research evaluation; Library and information science