Exploring Research Topics in the Field of School Librarianship based on Text Mining

Abstract

This study used text mining to explore research topics in the two leading research journals in the field of school librarianship, School Libraries Worldwide and School Library Research. Titles and abstracts were collected from 225 articles of the two journals for the 10 years, 2006 through 2015. Term frequency analysis and topic modeling based on Latent Dirichlet allocation were employed to analyze the collected data. The findings showed the most frequently observed terms and imply the importance of learning, education and programing in school library research. Topic modeling extracted 20 research topics in the field including: school library programming; information literacy; professional roles; digital and technology leadership; research design; policy and management; and others. This study confirmed that programming related topics have been the most widely researched in school librarianship. In both journals, programming is a popular topic. Additionally, professional role, technology, and inquiry skills are amongst popular topics in School Libraries Worldwide, while information literacy, reading, and learning are more common topics in School Library Research.

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No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.