Sentiment analysis of online discussion of LIS professionals using R

The main focus of the present study was threefold. Firstly, extraction of the data from the Library and Information Science (LIS) Links; secondly, pre-process the data to remove noises on maximum parameters; and lastly, to know the polarity of the discussion posted on LIS Links.

The advancement in the internet and Web 2.0 technologies have facilitated the academic community with many online platforms like Q&A sites, mailing lists, discussion forums, etc. for disseminating or seeking information. LIS Links is one such discussion forum commonly used by Indian LIS professionals. The analysis of these discussions can help in knowing the experience of LIS professionals in different aspects. The present study is based on a lexicon-based approach, which works on the bag of word model. The open source environment R and its different packages were used for the analysis.

The analysis shows that the majority of the posts on LIS Links were discussed with positive sentiments. There were only very few words of negative sentiments on the discussion forum of LIS Links.

The above review of the literature shows that there have been many studies in different domains. The user responses on different platforms were explored. Also, some studies have conducted sentiment analysis in LIS. However, this was limited to content posted by the libraries or the reviews of books. No research was found in the published literature on the analysis of the opinion of LIS professional.