SLIS MLS student, Ulrich Houzanme, presented a poster on influential researchers from Africa in the field of Library and Information Science at the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) 2011 Annual Meeting. The conference was held this year in New Orleans, Louisiana from October 9-12, 2011. Ulrich stated that ASIS&T offered a platform where the constructive criticism received will help improve his research. He expects the paper to be ready for publication in the early months of next year.
• PDF of Poster
Who are the Most Influential Researchers in Library and Information Science in Africa?: An Informetric and Evaluative Investigation of LIS Researcher’s Output and Impact in Mainstream Citation Sources.
At the bottom of his poster is an "Acknowledgements" section where he thanks SLIS faculty and his classmates for their input and support.
• Abstract
Purpose:
Scientific progress builds on prior influential researchers' work. However, leading researchers in Library and Information Science in Africa are not known/ranked with state of the art metrics instruments. This paper aims to close the gap by identifying and ranking the most influential researchers in LIS in Africa to inform the research community and policy stakeholders.
Design/Methodology/Approach:
Citations data on LIS research in Africa are collected from the three most important databases (WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar) and used to compute the H-index and M-index of leading researchers, then descriptive statistics is used to analyse results.
Findings:
Continental, regional and country-specific lists of the most influential researchers in LIS in Africa classified by indices obtained through publications affiliated with African countries.
Research Limitations/Implications:
The reliance on major databases’ accuracy in extracting citations and their editorial policies guiding their selections of which journals —consequently which research papers—and which citing papers are included in their database.
Social Implications:
Researchers and research institutions, libraries, and various organizations could use this paper for information, research, reward, collection development, collaboration and policy purposes. Further researches will look upon these results to expand research questions.
Originality/Scholarly Significance:
In using two non-correlating h-type indices (h-index & m-index) this evaluative research breaks new grounds by making available a ranking of the most influential researchers in a comprehensive, consistent and total manner (Bouyssou & Marchant, 2011).
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photo credit: Kun Lu
Posted December 05, 2011