Top 100 cited papers in Information and Library science: A Brief Analysis

High number of citations of research publications expresses its intellectual and cognitive impact. Papers with high citations are considered as a landmark in relevant research field as these express trends and emerging research areas as well as set future course of research. The objective of this study is to conduct bibliometric analysis of the top 100 most cited studies in the discipline of Information Science and Library Science. The data for the study was obtained from “Information Science and Library Science” category of Web of Science, as indexed in the last twenty-one years (2000-2021). The outcome of bibliometric analysis included progressive growth in citation over time, annual citation density, name of journal with its impact factor, which published these papers, year of publication, type of article i.e. articles, proceedings, book reviews, reviews and poetry etc; nature of access i.e. subscribed or open access, and country of origin. Number of citations of these papers as reported by Web of Science were cross checked with numbers of citations reported by Google Scholar to understand which one provided higher number of citations for the same paper. The number of citations in the top 100 cited papers ranged from 699 to14,273. The large numbers of the top 100 cited papers were published in MIS Quarterly. There were 40 publications authored by two, while 13 other papers were authored by more than four authors. This research is valuable for scholars in the discipline of library science and information science in identifying highly cited papers in the last 21 years, frequently pursued research areas, and names of journals publishing high quality research work in library Science discipline. The study of frequently cited papers will also guide in designing of objectives and methodology of future research studies. Journals have been charging very high subscription fee. This study will also help librarian in identifying journals which are making valuable contributions in the discipline of Information and Library Science.


INTRODUCTION
The researchers cite highly scholarly research works to convince audiences that their research work is built upon previously published authoritative work. [1]The number of citations of a research paper is a measure of its merit and impact on future research studies.Bornmann and Daniel [2] reviewed 30 studies on citing behaviour of researchers and concluded that the researchers cite to acknowledge the intellectual contributions of their peers.The analysis of citations has become standard benchmark to evaluate scientific endeavours, such analysis also helps in understanding trends in scholarly works in a particular area of study.The present paper aims to characterise the published literature in Information Science Library Science to identify the most frequently cited papers in the last 21 years, the journals in which these papers were published and number of authors of these publications.

Review of Literature
Meyer and Spencer [3] expressed importance of studying highly cited papers in LIS discipline as research works in LIS discipline are also cited in other disciplines like computer science, medicine, psychology.Ivanovic and Ho [4] studied 501 highly cited articles published between 1956 and 2009 in 37 journals and found that MIS quarterly had published 26% of all the analysed highly cited articles.The researchers from USA had contributed 67% of all highly cited articles.Levitt and Thelwall [5] analzed 82 highly cited research papers in Information Science Library science indexed in Web of Science and concluded that there is a moderate correlation between citation ranking and period between year of publication and year of the highest number of citations.

Objectives of the Study
The current study conducted quantitively analysis of citation parameters of the highly cited 100 Library Science Information Science articles over the last 21 years i.e. from 2000 to 2020.The objectives of this study are: 1. To explore patterns of collaboration in the top 100 cited papers; 2. To identify journals frequently publishing high quality research work (highly cited research papers) in the Library Science and Information Science discipline.
3. To understand pattern of the citations of the top cited paper over the time 4. To identify prime research areas were covered by highly cited articles.

Null Hypothesis
1.There is no difference in numbers of citations in research publications published in paid subscription-based journals and journals with open access 2. There is no association in origin (country) of research work and its publication country.
3. There is no change in contributions (Numbers of research papers) of researchers from USA in the library science and information science discipline over a period of 21 years  The analysis of numbers of citations when papers were classified on nature of publications reflects that research papers are the most cited document type followed by reviews and proceedings papers of Seminars/Conferences as shown in Table 4.

Cross comparison of number of citations reported by WoS and Google Scholar
The citations of the 100 articles were also collected from Google Scholar.It was found that there was a difference of over 5000 citations in 11 papers; 3000 to 5000 in 14 papers; 45 papers noted a difference of 1000 to 2000 citations.Google Scholar provides more citations as evident through Table 05.
Web of Science on its web site states that it indexes journals with high scholarly values.Each journal has to clear rigorous evaluation criteria before getting indexed in the Web of Sciences.Once a journal is selected for indexing in Web of Science then all the back issues are indexed in the citation database.The analysis reflects that Google Scholars reports a higher number of citations in comparison to the number of citations reported by Web of Sciences Core.

Association in Number of Citations Reported by WoS -Core and WoS-All Database
The analysis of citations records reflects that numbers of citations in WoS-all database is always higher than as reported by WoS Core index.The ratio between Numbers of citations reported by WoS-all database to WoS-core range between 1 to 1.23 (mean of ratio is 1.02 with standard deviation .023).
The descriptive statistics parameters of numbers of citations reported by WoS -all database and WoS Core reflects minor gaps in Wos-Core and WoS -all database that both the WoS-Core and WoS-all databases can be treated as reliable sources to know numbers of citations to individual papers.The value of binary association between numbers of citations as reported by WoS-Core and WoS -all databases is 1.0, thus both the indexes reported the same parameter.

Author Defined Keywords and Keyword Plus
There were 454 unique author defined keywords in 100 top cited papers in Information science library science in the last 21 years.There were 16 author keywords in two articles; one article had 13 author keywords, 71 publications had 2-11 author defined keywords; while 24 publications did not have any author keyword.There were 14 research papers which had keyword "technology acceptance model".It is the most frequently repeated author defined keyword.It is followed by author defined keyword "trust" appeared in seven papers.Information Technology and Technology Acceptance model appeared in four research papers.There are 10 keywords which appeared in three research papers.There were 36 keywords which appeared in two papers.There were 340 unique keywords which reflect once in research papers, Table 6.

Keyword -Plus
There were 5 research papers without Keyword -Plus.

Number of Research Papers with Popular Keyword Plus
The Table 8 reflects keyword Plus which appeared in five or more research papers in top 100 cited publications in the last 21 years in Information Science Library Science discipline.

Countries of Origin of and Countries of Publication
50 out of 64 research papers contributed by researchers from USA were also published in USA; one out of six papers originated in Canada was published in USA.Similarly, two out of five papers originated from Netherland were published in USA; and one out of five papers originated from Taiwan was published in USA.Hence, papers which originated from countries other than USA are lesser likely be published in USA as compare to papers originated from USA.
papers contributed by authors from other than USA were published in USA.
The association in country of origin of research and country of publishing was statistically examined with Chi square test, as shown in Table 15.
The level of significance of Chi-square test reflects that there was significant association in origin of research work and its publication.Research Papers which are originated from USA are more likely to be published in journals published from USA.There were 13 research papers in "Information Science and Library Science; Business and Economics" research areas and all these papers were originated from USA.

Origin of Research and Year of Publication
In the initial years most of the top cited papers were authored by researchers from USA. 24 in top 100 cited paper in the last The contributions of authors from other than USA was very low in the range of one to three papers, therefore the  The significance level of Chi-square test value reflects that there was no significant change in contributions (Numbers of research papers) of researchers from USA in the library science and information science discipline over a period of 21 years.

Year of Publication and Country of Publication
Publications are classified by country of publication and year of publication in the Table 17.The Table 18 reflects that 67 out of 100 top cited research papers in Library Science Information Science in the last 21 years were published in USA, similarly 62.9 of publications between 2006-10 were published in USA.The Table 18 reflects that there was no change in volume of publications published in USA over the period of 21 years.

Table 1 : Year-wise publication of top 100 cited papers. year of publication Total no papers Average no of citation per paper Subscription based access Open Access No of papers Average no of citation per paper No of papers Average no of citation per paper
sorted by the number of citations in descending order.Two researchers performed the paper selection and data extraction.Any disagreement on data extraction was resolved through discussion and consensus.The assessment stopped at the hundredth most cited paper.The following information was extracted for each paper: number of citations, title, authors papers with open access had mean number of citations of 1408.05.It is observed that papers published in Journals with open access got lesser numbers of citations than papers published in paid subscription-based journals Table 1, 2. The difference in number of citations of papers published in paid subscription-based journals and journals with open access was statistically examined with Independent Samples t-test.The level of significance of the value of Levene's Test reflects that both the groups do not differ on variances in number of citations Table 3.The significance level of value of t test reflects that there was no difference in number of citations in research papers with open access and subscribed access.The null hypothesis is not rejected i.e. there is no difference in numbers of citations in research publications published in paid subscription-based journals and journals with open access(name, number, authorship position, and country), year of publication, title of the journals, study design, and thematic field.The hundred records were saved as MS-Excel file.Google Scholar was also searched for numbers of citations for 100 publications examined in this study.The authors applied quantitative statistical techniques to enlighten descriptive and inferential analysis of the data.The descriptive analysis highlights frequency, mean, standard deviation, range of numbers of citations of highly cited papers.

Table 4 : Type of Documents of top 100 cited publication in library science Information science discipline. Type of publication Number of Publications Number of Citations Average number of citations Themes
➢Factors to use for determining sample size scope and nature of the topic and study, design and availability of shadowed data.Type of DocumentsWeb of Science (WoS) citation index classifies documents into Articles, Reviews, Article (Proceeding paper), Editorial Material, Abstract, Bibliography, Book, Case Report, Correction, Clinical Trial, Art and Literature, Letters, meeting note etc.The 100 documents were published in the form of articles, proceeding papers, reviews and editorials.Out of 100 publications,67 publications were in the form of articles.The prime themes covered by these articles includes information systems, usage, adoption and diffusion of technology, e-commerce, and use of social media.On an average an article received 1644.7 citations.There were 28 reviews which received 44123 citations, 1575.8 per published review.These review publications covered topics of Information systems; knowledge management and sharing; e commerce; use and adoption of technology and firms.There were three proceedings papers with 4453 citations; 1484.3 citations per publication.They covered topics of structural equation modelling; e-government; use and acceptance of technology and mapping of biomedical text to meta thesaurus.The editorial materials, two in number attracted 2820 citations, 1410 per editorial.The editorials focussed on the importance of published literature which becomes the foundation for future research; and the factors which must be considered while determining the sample size.

Table 5 : Gaps in numbers of citations reported by Web of Science Core and Google scholar. Gaps in numbers of citation reported by Google Scholar and WOS core database (No of citations by Google Scholar -No of citations by WOS) No of research papers
There were 386 keyword -Plus defined by WOS in rest of 95 research publications.There were 14 research papers having keyword Plus "User Acceptance".It was the most frequently repeated keyword-plus.It was followed by Keyword Plus "Information-Technology" which appeared in 13 papers; "Technology" keyword plus appeared in 12 research papers.Adoption and Model keyword plus appeared in 11 research papers.Internet and Perceived Usefulness appeared in 10 research papers."Performance"keywordplus appeared in 9 research papers.There were 273 unique keyword-plus which reflected in research papers only once.Table7reflects average numbers of citation in research papers having specific keyword plus.In case a paper had more than one keyword plus than number of citations, in that papers were counted with each keyword plus while computing number of citations and mean number of citations for keyword plus.

Table 6 : Author Keywords.
papers, Information and Management with 9 papers, Journal of The American Medical Informatics Association with 7 papers, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication with 6 papers.Three journals titled Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of The American Society for Information Science And Technology and Qualitative Health consumers, sustainable consumption, saturation, Business Intelligence, web, System, perspective, Multiple Processes and networking got high number of citations in recent years, thus research publications focused on ICT, Internet, Web, library automation, AI application in libraries got lot of attention in recent years.

Table 19 : Year of publication and country of publication. Year of publication USA out side of USA Total
papers have exceptionally very high numbers of citation making high value of mean numbers.It is followed by research paper in the area "Communication; Information Science and Library Science" with 1925.3 mean number of citation per paper, Table20.