Patterns of Scholarly Communication in Information Policy: A Bibliometric Study

摘要

This paper reports on a bibliometric investigation into the structure and dynamics of the information policy journal literature. The unit of analysis is a document test collection of 771 articles published between 1972 and 1996. This test collection was compiled from records in the multidisciplinary database Social Sciences Citation Index. The investigation focuses on patterns of growth, knowledge accumulation, ageing and obsolescence, documentary scatter and knowledge production. It concludes that the structure and dynamics of the information policy journal literature diverges in several respects from typical social science literatures. Information policy is characterised by very rapid growth, high immediacy (in Price's sense), rapid reception and ageing processes and relatively low documentary scatter. These findings are put in the context of related work in bibliometrics and in the sociology of science wherever possible.