RESEARCH TRENDS OF OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATIONS IN LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Covid-19 has altered the way of life of human civilization. The new paradigm demanded novel solutions to cope with this shift, as a response to which the scientific community developed and disseminated knowledge. The open access movement catalyzed the hurdle-free access to this knowledge. Though there has been sufficient research on understanding the trends of open access knowledge dissemination in domains of science and medicine, the areas of social science and humanities remained unexplored. This study explores the patterns of scholarly work disseminated as publications, citations, and collaborations from the library and information sciences field. Bibliometric analysis is a tool that facilitates an understanding of the patterns existing within this domain. The publications from leading journals in the LIS domain were collected from the Scopus database and analyzed to decipher the patterns and trends in publications during the Covid-19 pandemic. The results inform researchers about the extent of productive collaboration, prolific authors, and corresponding trends in this domain during the pandemic period.