Journals and the Shaping of Disciplinary Knowledge

There appears to be a quite long-standing assumption that journals in scholarly fields are responsible for two functions: 1) they make public the work being done at a particular time in the field (thus reflecting the knowledge base of the field, and 2) they select what is to be communicated in the field (thus shaping the knowledge base of the field). While it very difficult to determine which of the functions actually describes journals’ roles (primarily because of some privacy issues), it seems clear that journals do play an important part in the communication of knowledge in scholarly disciplines. This paper will address a couple of key issues related to the disciplinary role of journals in library and information science (LIS). The first issue is the nature of knowledge as communicated through public mechanisms such as journals. The second issue is the set of attributes that characterizes a portion of the content of LIS journals. In order to complete this examination a group of LIS journals with an explicit international focus will be examined.