Characteristics and Trends in Literature of Library Service Quality as Reflected in Scopus

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the scattered behaviour of the overall published output of library service quality literature. Different parameters have been taken into consideration to analyze the literature on library service quality. The bibliographical data of the total number of publications published on Library Service Quality (LSQ), during 1960–2018 were searched from the Scopus database by using the search phrases, “Library Service Quality”, LibQual and LibQual+, in Title, Abstract and Keyword have been used with Boolean operator ‘OR’ on December 8th, 2019. The search query resulted in 290 records. The first-ever publication published in the field of library service quality was published in 1997 as reflected from the Scopus database. The data were analyzed to observe the year wise pattern of growth of output with citations per publication (CPP), most prolific countries, institutions, and authors. It also identified the distribution of citations with highly cited papers and further source titles were used to establish the linkage between research results. Analyzing authors, institutions and country of the publications, citations complete count methodology was followed. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Iran were found to be the leading contributors to the field, and the pattern of growth is undulating. The journal articles (228) were scattered among 80 source titles, and it connotes that on an average, approximately three articles were produced by each source title. Moreover, a detailed and comprehensive content analysis of all the publications of clusters formed in co-citation and bibliographic coupling networks was employed to get the in-depth knowledge of the trend in concerning literature. The present study is the first bibliometric as well as text-analysis research to assess the overall research output on service quality in the field of Libraries & Information Science.

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