A temporally dynamic examination of research method usage in the Chinese library and information science community

摘要

In this paper, we discuss how research methods are used in the Chinese library and information science (LIS) community, a fundamental question in the pursuit of a global overview of this interdisciplinary research domain. We used manual coding to identify research methods mentioned in 2,421 Chinese-language papers written by 53 prestigious Chinese LIS researchers across different generations. For all selected publications, we manually identified and classified methods using a modified version of an established classification scheme for LIS research methods. Moreover, we examined how research methods are used by researchers belonging to different age groups over time. We identified a significant shift in the use of methods among examined publications: quantitative methods are increasingly used over time, driven both by the emergence of newer generations of researchers and by senior researchers gradually adopting newer methods. These findings reflect a major, and heretofore undiscussed, shift in research style in the LIS community in China. Our approach facilitates a new, more dynamic discussion of how research methods are adopted in a research community and will greatly contribute to future studies on this topic.