Characteristics of LIS Research Articles Affecting Their Citation Impact

The paper analyses the citation impact of Library and Information Science, LIS for short, research articles published in 31 leading international LIS journals in 2015. The main research question is: to what degree do authors' disciplinary composition in association with other content characteristics of LIS articles affect their citation impact? The impact is analysed in terms of the number of citations received and their authority, using outlier normalization and subfield normalization. The article characteristics analysed using quantitative content analysis include topic, methodology, type of contribution, and the disciplinary composition of their author teams. The citations received by the articles are traced from 2015 to May 2021. Citing document authority is measured by the citations they had received up to May 2021. The overall finding was that authors' disciplinary composition is significantly associated with citation scores. The differences in citation scores between disciplinary compositions appeared typically within information retrieval and scientific communication. In both topics LIS and computer science jointly received significantly higher citation scores than many disciplines like LIS alone or humanities in information retrieval, or natural sciences, medicine, or social sciences alone in scientific communication. The paper is original in allowing joint analysis of content, authorship composition, and impact.