A study of 5,281 papers from 81 countries published over thirty years analyzes the global development of Library and Information Science (LIS) through the lens of research methods. The researchers manually annotated a subset of articles for content analysis and trained a deep learning model to automatically classify these methods across the dataset.
- Each country exhibits a unique research profile and distribution of methods, even when investigating identical topics.
- Differences between national and international distributions of research methods have decreased over the past 30 years.
- The study highlights distinct characteristics of discipline development in various countries based on methodological choices.
This analysis provides insights into usage trends that can guide national-level discipline development and promote collaboration between countries.