Usage of the term provenance in LIS literature: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

Abstract

Abstract Provenance is the story of how something has come to be. In this paper, we provide a systematic literature review to categorize the various notions of provenance in Information Sciences. The goal of this review is to paint a broader picture of the multiple uses of provenance at play and to enhance our understanding of the importance of provenance in research and practice. Through a seven‐step systematic review process, we investigated 245 articles in total, collected through Web of Science, and arrived at six provenance types: provenance as story , as authenticity , as performance of compliance , as process , as discriminator , and as system characterization . Based on the 245 article abstracts, we further employed BERTopics and found top sub‐disciplines of LIS that focus on provenance efforts, including archival research, digital preservation, linked data, and research data management. The contributions of this work are two‐fold: (1) to enhance the understanding of the many faces of provenance; (2) to synthesize state‐of‐the‐art provenance research in information science and related fields.

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