The shifting sands of disciplinary development: Analyzing North American Library and Information Science dissertations using latent Dirichlet allocation

  • Authors:

  • Cassidy R. Sugimoto;Daifeng Li;Terrell G. Russell;S. Craig Finlay;Ying Ding

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington, 1320 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405‐3907;School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, 777 Guoding Rd, Shanghai, China;School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 216 Lenoir Drive, 100 Manning Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599‐3360;School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington, 1320 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405‐3907;School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington, 1320 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405‐3907

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This work identifies changes in dominant topics in library and information science (LIS) over time, by analyzing the 3,121 doctoral dissertations completed between 1930 and 2009 at North American Library and Information Science programs. The authors utilize latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify latent topics diachronically and to identify representative dissertations of those topics. The findings indicate that the main topics in LIS have changed substantially from those in the initial period (1930–1969) to the present (2000–2009). However, some themes occurred in multiple periods, representing core areas of the field: library history occurred in the first two periods; citation analysis in the second and third periods; and information‐seeking behavior in the fourth and last period. Two topics occurred in three of the five periods: information retrieval and information use. One of the notable changes in the topics was the diminishing use of the word library (and related terms). This has implications for the provision of doctoral education in LIS. This work is compared to other earlier analyses and provides validation for the use of LDA in topic analysis of a discipline. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.