Partnerships or parallel lines? The contributions of practitioners and academics to library and information research

Introduction. Academic libraries are seeking to extend their roles beyond traditional document provision and knowledge discovery into such areas as strategic research support, research data management and scholarly publishing. Consequently, more academic librarians will need to develop a robust understanding of the scholarly research process as experienced by academics. This paper examines a sample of recent articles in established library and information studies (LIS) journals to identify the comparative contributions of librarians (practitioners) and academics and the extent of collaboration between these groups, based on jointly written articles. Method. Journals were drawn from the Scimago Library and Information Sciences list and an algorithm was used to identify authors of individual papers as practising librarians or library and information studies (LIS) academics, or both (joint authorship). Keywords were extracted and aggregated by author category to identify the subject interests of these two groups. Analysis. Keywords were manually clustered, and filtered using Excel, to determine the topics of most interest to the different groups of authors. Results. Analysis of keywords highlights the different spheres of interest each group has, and questions the degree of alignment between the scholarly literature and the widely-recognised preoccupations of the field. The results indicate striking differences as well as broad areas of common interest. Conclusion. Currently, the two groups (practitioners and academics) are running on parallel, or even diverging, lines in their respective approaches to the practice of research within their shared discipline.