The shifting balance of intellectual trade in information studies

The authors describe a large-scale, longitudinal citation analysis of intellectual trading between information studies and cognate disciplines. The results of their investigation reveal the extent to which information studies draws on and, in turn, contributes to the ideational substrates of other academic domains. Their data show that the field has become a more successful exporter of ideas as well as less introverted than was previously the case. In the last decade, information studies has begun to contribute significantly to the literatures of such disciplines as computer science and engineering on the one hand and business and management on the other, while also drawing more heavily on those same literatures. INTRODUCTION Citation analysis is a powerful means of mapping the flow of ideas between specialty groups, disciplines and nation states (e.g., Liu & Wang, 2005; Peritz & Bar-Ilan, 2002; Urata, 1990). The matrices and maps produced by bibliometricians and others can be used to demonstrate the relative impact and perceived utility of research, all the way from a single paper on topic X to the entire published output of a nation state in a discipline, in both domestic (intradisciplinary) and foreign (extra-disciplinary) markets. Here we describe a large-scale citation analysis of intellectual trading between information studies and other disciplines. The results of our study reveal the extent to which information studies draws on and in turn contributes to the ideational bases of other academic domains. For an overview of the theory and application of citation analysis, the reader is referred to Garfield (1979). Cronin, B., & Meho, L. I. (2008). The shifting balance of intellectual trade in information studies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(4), 551–564.