Aspects of Authorship in Journal Special Issues: An Experience from DESIDOC Journal of Library and In- formation Technology

Copyright © The Author(s). 2017 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. ABSTRACT In the spirit of introspection, present study bibliometrically analyses 59 special issues comprising of 346 scholarly articles of DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Science (DJLIT). To investigate the metrics of author inclusiveness of special issue publications, present study examines authorship pattern, nature of authorship, trend and type of collaboration along with some demographic attributes like seniority, gender and professional rank/positions. Subsequent analysis focuses on prolific contributors, degree of collaboration, collaborative index, geographical and institutional diversities. The study shows sustainable growth of special issues with domination of senior/ veteran authors from national research institutions around New Delhi. Dominance of single authors (with nominal senior – senior collaboration) is attributed to less author diversity in this specialty. Author base is mostly endowed with blend of senior academia and LIS practitioners (having senior signing pattern) besides stray participations of specialized professionals. Study, therefore recognizes the fact that LIS special issue literatures are dominated by eminent and veteran authors, which eventually help to elevate scholarship, visibility and reputation of the source journal.


INTRODUCTION
Over the last 350 years, journal publication has been the predominant forum for disseminating scholarly knowledge.
[1] Being primary micro document, journals feature nascent thoughts of vanguard's tacit knowledge the peer community.Besides publishing issues at regular frequencies, publishing authorities of scholarly journals, often stipulates some 'topics of current interest' and invites for relevant communications focusing on that 'specific theme'.Journal issues -dedicating to a particular contemporary topic to highlight emerging areas of cutting-edge research, generally perceived as 'special issues' [2] Besides collocating papers focusing on specific theme, special issues often provides opportunity to review the existing theme, examine previously unfolded aspects, propose and develop new approaches, exchange perspectives and encourage new lines of research. [3,4]Emerald [5] opines that special issues bring together a range of contributions on a given theme and allow for extensive treatment of a topic which is generally impossible within the normal scope of the journal.Besides, boosting readership, citation and subscriptions to professional rank, affiliation, geographical location and nature of collaboration.To gauge authorship diversity, bibliographic profile of contributors over the author's position in the byline of publications is explored from DJLIT special issue publications up to December 2016.However, specific objectives are: • To explore and analyses the authorship profiles of DJLIT special issues; • To determine the pattern of authorship and collaboration among contributing authors; • To deduce the degree of collaboration, collaborative index among the authors; • To enumerate ranking of prolific authors and their affiliated institutions : • To identify the geographical and institutional diversity of special issue contributors; • To ear-mark other aspects of authorship to assess the inclusiveness criterion.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Authorship has been key attribute of biblimetric analysis, ever since the inception of metric-based studies.Consequently, significant number of studies has been conducted in different dimensions to analyze and interpret authorship attributes across disciplines. [13]As far as LIS is concerned, Brissett [14] provided the historical perspective of authorship studies and observed that earlier authorship studies [15,16,17,18] were mostly confined to examine authorship elements like gender, occupation and geographic locations.Findings showed dominance of male LIS practitioners (librarians, faculty and administrators).
So far as DJLIT is concerned, author has identified large array [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] of bibliometric studies.Longitudinal review of literature has revealed the fact that -studies are mostly dealing with content analysis of DJLIT over certain period of time.Sometimes studies are even overlapping in scope, objectives and time lines.Of which, Kumar, Bansal & Kanungo [28] have portrayed the genesis and sustainable growth of DJLIT towards embracing contemporary IT tools by the LIS community.Therefore, in view of above, it might be difficult to fathom out need for 'another study' on DJLIT.But, inspite of so many studies, no studies have ventured exclusively on the Special Issues (based on contemporary themes supposed to be emphasized on).Present study, therefore uniquely and exclusively attempt to concentrate on the articles that are published under the banner of Special Issues on the DJLIT to reveal its uniqueness with regards to authors' inclusiveness dilemma!
Operational Hypotheses: Journal Special Issues and Authorship Dilemma Owing to fidelity towards 'specific theme of research', special issues invariably solicit communications within declared scope of journal.Therefore, in one sense, special issues are restrictive in 'topics of investigation' which might lead to affect authorship attributes.We could assume two classes of authors on account of different approach towards publishing of special issues.
Reportedly, special issue stipulates a 'theme of research', thereby allows only limited set of researcher (commonly vanguards) to serve as author.Moreover, the guest editor (acts as the central player of SI publication), the reviewers (validates the research thereon) and the authors (creator of communication) from an 'insular network of researcher' having analogous research interest.Eventually, authors who publish in the special issues often come from the same set of 'semantic network'.Therefore it is more likely, that communications of special issues are dominated by renowned and eminent authors who are also well-published.Thus we would expect lesser diversity of authorship in journal special issue publications.
On the other hand, one of the main functions of special issues is to act as the 'vanguards of knowledge' which curve a path towards new topics. [12]This in turn, might lead to open possibilities for 'newer set of researcher' to communicate 'newer aspects of research' through their innovative communications which otherwise remains unexplored.From this perspective, one would speculate array of debutante authors (with lesser exposure) for special issue communicationswhich might introduce greater diversity into 'insular network of researcher'.Thus, from intrinsic nature of special issues we could identify two contrasting aspects regarding nature of authorship; one is suggesting dominance of eminent and veteran authors with lesser diversity, whereas the other proposes for greater diversity with new or debutante authors.

SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES
Ongoing discussion has fixated two contradicting issues regarding 'nature of authorship' of special issues.To address this speculation in the field of LIS, we examine the journal articles featured under special issues on DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Science (DJLIT).Noteworthy is the fact that, within DJLIT Special Issues, there are some scholarly articles which by any means as good as special issue articles, but not featured under special issues by the journal authority.Therefore, these general articles are not taken into our study.Moreover, Guest editorials of special issues are excluded from the analysis since these are mostly meant for introduction of the special issues.
Main objective of this analysis is to identify the 'diversity of authorship' with regards to number, pattern, seniority,

METHODOLOGY
Keeping in view of the aforesaid objectives, primary data for the study has been retrieved from the DJLIT website. [29]For data collection, bibliometric scrutiny method is mostly employed.If the first name could not be attributed to either gender, the information provided in the 'about the author' section of the source article, is consulted.In some cases gender was ascertained by conducting an 'image search'.Author's occupation was determined by analyzing the affiliations provided with each article.This was further confirmed by consulting the 'about the author' section provided at the end of each article.However, in few articles, author's affiliations were not mentioned, in such cases -authors affiliations available in other articles of DJLIT is considered.Rank lists of prolific contributors and their affiliated institutions have been prepared based on the fractional counting method and normal counting method respectively. [30]esearch collaboration among the scholars has been assessed in terms of proportion of non-collaborative to collaborative papers.Extent of collaboration are further estimated in the form of 'degree of collaboration' (DC) and 'collaborative index' (CI) using Subramanyan's formula [31] and Lawani's formula [32] respectively.Thus, systematic analysis of collected data has been worked out in different dimensions using simple mathematical and statistical techniques.

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
Analysis of collected data is carried out using simple mathematical operations so as to test the operational hypothesis regarding aspects of authorship with respect to inclusiveness.These have been categorized into range of tables and presented in subsequent paragraphs.

General Status of DJLIT Special Issue articles
DJLIT has long tradition of featuring special issues on contemporary theme of emerging areas of information technology applicable to library and information science.It has published the first special issue during September 1992 under the auspices of birth centenary of Dr S R Ranganathan.

Coauthoring Pattern of DJLIT Special Issue
Research collaboration is the mark of 20 th century academia, mostly viewed as an attitude towards linking distributed knowledge and competencies into novel ideas so as to improve the quality of research.Conventionally, collaborative activity is often been estimated from the measure of multi-authored or co-authored publications. [33] ).Further analysis of collaborative publications in the byline of order of authorship, reveal the fact that majority of (54%) collaboration occurs between senior authors (in terms of age and professional rank), followed by collaboration between senior and junior authors (21%), junior and senior authors (19%) and junior and junior authors (5%).Findings suggest that senior authors are more likely to appear at the first position in the byline of special issue publications of DJLIT, which some way reinforce the first proposition of our hypotheses.However, finding seems to contradict with the general trends of order of authorship in collaborative research -where seniors authors (normally supervisor of the research) comes at the last position (viz.senior signing pattern).
In depth analysis of non-collaborative articles (Appendix -1) reflects that, about 46 %( 159) contributions are from India   also reflects that during the study period, degree of collaboration varies inconsistently within 0.66 with a nominal average of 0.42.Another proxy measure of research collaborationcollaborative index was not also significant, as average CI is found to be 2.44. Figure 2 shows chronological variations of DC and CC over the study period.From above analysis, it is found that collaborative research is still not popular practice in case of DJLIT special issues.However, dominance solo research could be an indication of less author-inclusiveness in case of DJLIT special issues.Little surprisingly, findings are consistent with previous studies in LIS arena. [34]nking of Prolific Authors Table 3 enumerates ranking of contributing authors of special issues of DJLT based on weighted values of total contributions.Ranking of authors have been estimated employing 'fractional counting method' to produce distinctive listing of contributors so as to remove anonymous ranking. [35]It is observed that 346 special issue articles of DJLIT are contributed by 434 unique authors in different authorship positions.Of which, only 49(11%) authors have weight > 1 whereas majority authors 257 (59 %) have weight <1.Result signifies that, share of productive authors (in terms of weighted contribution) is quite small in the total author base.However, top ranks were dominated by eminent senior LIS professionals like C K Ramiah, M P Satija, B. M. Gupta, S.M. Dhawan, N.V. Sathyanarayana, V K Gupta, Sujit Bhattacharya, Pratibha A. Gokhale, A. Amudhavalli and Gangan Prathap.Though there is handful of young and debutant authors like Smita Chandra, Bharat Kumar, G. Mahesh, Alka Bansal, D.R. Patel, Dipti Arora.Finding implies that, among large set of author population, only small portion contribute significantly in special issue publications.Interestingly, many of prolific authors of special issues also emerged as significant authors found in recent study [36] on DJLIT.
It is therefore, evident from the analysis that, DJLIT special issues are predominantly authored by senior and eminent LIS professionals thereby supports the proposition that special issues are lesser authors inclusive.However, in the rank list (particularly in lower positions) individual author names and authorship distribution of contributors belongs in the same rank were not mentions to avoid longer listing.Unsurprisingly, most of the productive contributors are associated with LIS departments of University and research institutions.20), Readers (6) and Teachers (4).However, inspite of best efforts, designation / positions of few authors were not ascertained from the source articles.Another significant fact is that about 52% (228 in numbers) of authors having PhD.Thus, predominance of author representation from senior academia and professional practitioner (including LIS) is fairly consistence throughout the DJLIT special issue publications.Therefore, we can conclude that academia and working professionals is the main author base of DJLIT special issues of which senior rank holders are clearly predominating.

Geographical Diversity of DJLIT Special Issue Authors
Our analysis of the authors' affiliations revealed that DJLIT special issues are contributed from 24 countries across the globe (Table -5).Country names of the contributors have been identified from the corresponding affiliations as found in respective special issue publications.Rank list of affiliated countries is prepared on the basis of decreasing number of affiliations from the countries.Unsurprisingly, India contributed 328 (75.58%) the most, followed by USA (7.14%), Greece (3.23%), Singapore (2.53%) and UK (1.61%).Result identifies author representation from 24 countries across 6 continents (except Antarctica).However, it is perhaps little surprising the dominance of Indian contribution in the DJLIT special issues, as the Journal was created and established in India with Indian editors.
Table 5A shows regional distribution of DJLIT special issue authors among different states & union territories of India.Expectedly, New Delhi shares about 31% of total Indian contribution is on the top of the list, followed by Karnataka (16%), Maharastra (13%), Andhra Pradesh (10%)and Uttar Pradesh(6%).Though there are 24 regions found in the list, • Analysis of authorship pattern shows dominance (58%) of single author with average authorship of 1.61 per paper.Observation resembles with general authorship trends of LIS periodicals found earlier. [38]However, further analysis of collaboration activity shows that neither average degree of collaboration (0.42) nor average collaborative index (2.44) is impressive.

FINDINGS OF THE STUDY
In the spirit of introspection, present study has provided some observation of broader spectrum with regards to authorship diversity of DJLIT special issues.These are as follows: • DJLIT has been quite consistent (annual average 2.36 issues and 13.84 articles) in releasing special issues as it publishes

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Yearwise variations of DC and CC in DJLIT Spl Issues.
Table 1 represents descriptive statistics about DJLIT special issues published during the course of 25 years (1992 -2016).Tabulation shows, DJLIT has released as many as 59 special issues containing 346 scholarly articles distributed over 20 volumes.The journal, on an average has been publishing 2.36 special issues per year.

Table 2
reflects that out of 346 special issue articles, majority 200 (58%) are singled authored -therefore non-collaborative; while rest of 146 (42%) are collaborative.Further analysis shows that, out of 146 collaborative articles, only 22(6.36%) are purely foreign contributions (having no Indian authors) and majority 116(33.53%)belongs to domestic contributions (i.e.collaboration within Indian authors) while international collaborative article (i.e.Indian authors collaborating with foreign counterparts) are only 8(2.31%

Table 4
depicts professional profiles of the contributing authors of DJLIT special issue.For the purpose, we consider 'the-then affiliations and positions' of the authors -as reflected in the respective source article.Analysis shows that -DJLIT special issues are authored by peoples of varied professions ranks