Productivity, visibility, authorship, and collaboration in library and information science journals: Central and Eastern European authors

From the bibliometric point of view, little is known about the development and status of library and information science (LIS) in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Since these countries represent a part of the European Research Area in which the LIS field plays an important role, we aim to investigate the paradigm of their scientific communication. The research sample consists of papers (n = 3301) from authors with addresses from at least one of the 15 CEE countries (11 EU: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, and 4 EU potential candidate countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia) published in 160 LIS journals indexed in Scopus in the period 1996–2017. Analyses of productivity, citations, trends in authorship over time, and collaboration were made for the LIS field full sample and five LIS subfields: communication, computer science, information science, library science, and scientometrics. Additionally, we aimed to investigate scientific communication pattern between domestic (CEE) journals, international (non-CEE) journals and the journal Scientometrics. Our results show interesting data spanning 21 years including the transition period of the CEE countries.