Title: Authorship Characterization in Library and Information Science Journals: Content Analysis
Author(s): Martins, Sugabsen and Joshua, Joan Adamu
Publication Year: 2024; Volume 19, Issue 3, pages 38-47

The dynamics of scholarly communication within specific fields can be understood byrnexamining authorship trends and patterns in academic publications. The purpose of thisrnstudy is to identify and characterize the dominant trends in authoring practices byrnperforming a content analysis of authorship features in the Middle Belt Journal of Libraryrnand Information Science MBJLIS. Data were collected from the journals website byrndownloading all papers published over a five-year period 20192023 totaling 69 papers.rnUsing this comprehensive dataset each issue and the papers within those issues werernreviewed to examine the number of articles in each volume assess the level of collaborationrnamong authors determine the institutional affiliations of the authors establish the themes ofrnthe papers and ascertain the geographic distribution of the authors. Descriptive statisticsrnwere employed to present and analyze the dataset with Microsoft Excel used to create visualrnrepresentations of the data. Results from the content analysis indicate that the journalrnpublished an average of 14 papers in each issue with two-author collaborations beingrnprominent among the authors. Universities had more papers affiliated with them compared tornother institutions. Themes emerging from the analysis included library services informationrnliteracy social media and the application of ICTs in libraries. These findings shed light onrnthe evolving nature of authorship in Library and Information Science LIS literature. It isrnrecommended that international collaborations be encouraged and that themes such asrnArtificial Intelligence AI cloud computing robotics and data mining in libraries bernexplored to understand how librarianship can leverage these advancements among otherrnsuggestions.