International Librarianship: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Field

This study is a bibliometric analysis of the literature in the field of international librarianship. The analysis is based on the reference patterns in the materials indexed by Library Literature for the years 1958 to 1990. The study is designed to answer four research questions: (1) Based on the existing literature, what disciplines have contributed to international librarianship? (2) How have the contributions of publications in international librarianship fluctuated over the years? (3) What countries have contributed publications in international librarianship? (4) Who are the key/principal individuals who have authored contributions to the international librarianship literature? Citation analysis was used to collect the data for this study. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data and present the results and findings. The major findings of the study are: (1) Examination of the interdisciplinarity of the field of international librarianship revealed that the contribution by other disciplines was only 13.02%, suggesting the field is self-sufficient, (2) Examination of the fluctuations in the number of publications revealed the contributions fluctuate somewhat erratically, (3) Investigation of the geographic distribution of the contributions to the field revealed a dominance by the more industrialized countries, who published the majority of the documents, and (4) identification of key contributors to the literature determined that the field is extremely insular.