research paper ideas for library science

• Browse Works
• Art & Humanities

Library and Information Science

Library and information science research papers/topics, perspectives on knowledge management:: a literature review.

Abstract: This paper is a study of theoretical perspectives on knowledge and Knowledge Management. Business organizations in the 21st century need effective Knowledge Management practices in order to enhance the performance and growth of their businesses and ensure long-term sustainability and competitive advantage. An understanding and appreciation of knowledge as a strategic resource is critical for organisational decision makers so that they can take Knowledge Management more seriously. T...

Motivation Cognitive and Behavioral Theories and Techniques

This paper describes Motivation: Cognitive and behavioral theories and techniques, it analyzed the three theories underlying the cognitive and behavioral theories and techniques, it examined the expectancy theory, assumptions underlying expectancy theory, the explanation, the applicability of the expectancy theory. It also examined the equity theory of motivation, gave an explanation of the equity theory, application of equity theory in an educational organization. It also examined the goal s...

A Critique of the paper ‘Library Architecture around the World’ by Garba, Chiwendu and Mustapha

For the past two decades, libraries have been dramatically reinventing their physical spaces. The traditional model of cavernous reading rooms and dark warrens separated by stacks of books is incompatible with the digital age. The library of today and tomorrow must provide versatile spaces that support a wide range of users’ learning and research activities while accommodating rapid advances in information technology (IT). As expectations for library resources and physical facilities have c...

How to Write an Empirical Review

The purpose of the paper is to offer guidance on how to write an empirical review. The paper presented an introduction, and discussed the concept of empirical review, the importance of empirical review, steps for writing empirical review, apractical approach to writing an empirical review, characteristics of a good empirical review and concluded with the following statement; well-crafted empirical reviews are the cornerstone of good papers, however it is not uncommon to find weak, or even abs...

Diversity of Information Services in the Library World

Regardless of which type of library and the environment it is designed to serve, the basic mission and objectives of information service provision should be to support and promote natural and social justice, equity, fair play and democratization of information access and utilization.  It is within this perspective that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities under the principles of non-discrimination, equal opport...

Controlled vocabulary

Virtually every common word in the English language has more than one meaning or senseand many of those senses have more than one nuance; many words can be used as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and/or adverbs. Search systems that purport to allow the use of natural language cannot yet successfully distinguish among different meanings or various parts of speech in very large general systems, although some progress has been made in narrow subject areas. 

Concepts of statistical analysis

In many fields of research, null hypothesis, significance tests, and p values are the accepted way of assessing the certainty with which research results can be extrapolated beyond the sample studied. The inevitable difficulties of statistical inference mean that these probabilities can only be tentative, but probabilities are the natural way to express uncertainties, so, arguably, researchers using statistical methods have an obligation to estimate how probable their hypotheses are by the be...

Concept of Information Retrieval and the Strategies

Information retrieval system (IRS) came into being as a means of ensuring that information generated and recorded do not get over time. Before knowledge became recorded, individuals formed the repository of knowledge. With libraries, repository of knowledge began to change into recorded form. 

An organized structure for vocabulary control

This paper examined the concept of controlled vocabulary, it gave the definition and discussed the major concerns in establishing a controlled vocabulary, the types of controlled vocabulary. The principles of creating vocabulary control, principles for applying controlled vocabulary, controlled vocabulary standards, mechanics of vocabulary control, the merits and demerits of vocabulary control, and vocabulary control challenges and their solutions, and other vocabulary control challenges. The...

A legal approach to indexing and Abstracting in academic libraries

The main aim of information is to get information at the right time. Therefore, this paper takes a legal approach to indexing and Abstracting in academic libraries. It generally takes an extensive look at the importance of indexing and abstracting as a tool for effective retrieval and dissemination of information in any academic library. 

A Critical Analysis of the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress houses the largest information resources, records and archival collection of materials in the world (Whitman, 2021). As part of the Library's mission to make its resources available and useful to the American public, the Library has digitized a number of these materials and has also created an array of online secondary sources that highlight life and work. 

Information Need and Seeking Behaviour of Pregnant Women in Ughelli General Hospital, Delta State

This paper examined the topic on information needs and seeking behaviour of Pregnant Women in Ughelli General Hospital, Delta State to this end therefore, the researcher came up with four objectives which are: to identify the information needs of pregnant women in ughelli general hospital, to ascertain the information seeking behaviour of pregnant women in ughelli general hospital, to identify the information sources used by pregnant women in ughelli general hospital, to identify challen...

Administration and Management of Digital Libraries: An Overview

This paper examined administration and management of digital libraries: an overview. The concept management was clearly defined and explained in the context o f the work; thereafter the term digital library was explained succinctly as an age that is characterized by efficient and effective conversion, storage, diffusion and dissemination of data to users. The various services that are performed in the digital environment were listed as follows: Circulation Services (Reader Services); Ser...

Knowledge and Access to Primary Health Care Information Among Women in Rural Setting

Primary health care center offer professional medical care for individuals based on a locality or community before shifting them to more advance hospital-based care. Unfortunately, few studies exist on Knowledge and access to primary health care information among women in rural area in developing countries. This study adopted interpretative paradigm and collected qualitative data using Dervin Sense-Making theory approach. The collected data were analyzed using inductive analytical processes. ...

Qualitative Data Collection, Analysis and Interpretation in Research Paradigms: The Case of Library and Information Science Research

Scholars base their research on certain philosophical paradigm. There is a close-fitting connection between interpretative research paradigm and qualitative methodology. Many novice scholars are experiencing difficulty in understanding the interconnection between interpretative research paradigm and qualitative methodology. Understanding this interconnection provides directions or guide for data collection, analysis and interpretation of findings. This article discussed the interconnection be...

Library and information Science Project Topics, thesis, seminars, research papers termpapers. Project topics in Library and information Science for students, undergraduates, MSc, HND, NCE.

Popular Papers/Topics

Strategies for combating book theft and vandalism in academic libraries (a case study of futo library), the importance of internet to students of academic institutions in nigeria (a case study of imo state univeristy owerri), the role of ict in the of reference services to library users in nigeria (a case study of imo state library), use of information and communication technology in academic libraries in nigeria (a case study of nnamdi azikiwe university awka), challenges in the education and training of library and information science students in nigerian, the effects of poor funding of public libaries in nigeria (a case study of imo state public library owerri), the role of ict in the effective management of students academic record (a case study of department of record and statistics federal polytechnic nekede), acquisition and management of serial in academic libraries in imo state (a case study of imo state university library), the relevance of ict in modern library setting of information and communication technology facilities in academic (a case study of federal university of technology library owerri), effects of poor implementation of collection development policy in academic libraries in imo state (a case study of federal polytechnic nekede owerri), evaluation of academic library services, the problems of acquisition of material and services to users in special libraries in nigeria (a case study of imo state house of assembly), the impact of information and communication technology (ict) in nigerian university libraries, choosing librarianship as a career choice by secondary school students (a case study of some selected secondary schools in lokoja metropolis), problems of book acquisition in academic libraries in imo state (a case study of imo state univeristy owerri (imsu)).

Privacy Policy | Refund Policy | Terms | Copyright | © 2024, Afribary Limited. All rights reserved.

newjerseystatemuseum.org |

Research paper topics in library and information science

A systematic approach is best when undertaking research in the library and information science. Not only should you have an in-depth knowledge of major themes in the area, but you should also be aware of current research methods and topics of influence, such as library systems, cooperation between libraries, and the flow of information between libraries.

Finding a good research paper topic can greatly depend upon your interests and what you took away from your coursework. Paying attention in classes and taking adequate notes makes it easier to assimilate that knowledge into a coherent research paper topic. Take a look at the following research paper topics for some ideas:

• A critical analysis of student attitudes towards cataloguing and classification in college campus libraries
• The Impact of Public Libraries at the state level
• The implementation of information and communication technology in academic libraries in Brazil
• Evaluating the effect of feminization and professionalization on librarianship
• The challenges involved in running private libraries in Nigeria
• Defining comparative and international library and information science
• An assessment of international cultural exchange through libraries
• The role of international librarianship in promoting freedom of information and expression
• International issues faced by librarians and information science professionals with regard to the knowledge society
• Exploring the relationship between government schools and public libraries in the context of South Asia
• The importance of resource-sharing in an international library network: bridging gaps using modern technology
• Tackling indigenous knowledge by adopting innovative tools and strategies
• The influence of library aid in developing countries during globalization
• A critical comparison of American librarianship and information science research in European countries
• Learnings from major book acquisitions in American academic libraries
• The expanding purview of American ideas in German public libraries
• The British Council and its critical role in building bridges across the developing world

Browsing through sample topics in library and information science can help you brainstorm your own ideas more effectively. Take the time to scan such resources and choose a topic that you can convincingly discuss and analyze. A good source for potential research paper topics and paper help is mypaperwriter.com , also papers written by past students as well as reputed works in the field.

Copyright ©2017 - newjerseystatemuseum.org

• University of Michigan Library
• Research Guides

Essentials of Library Research

• Choosing Your Topic
• Getting Started
• Finding Books & Media
• Finding Articles & Journals
• Evaluating Information
• Citing Sources

Choosing a Topic

Coming up with a topic for your paper can sometimes be the hardest or most frustrating part of the research process. It can be intimidating to have a big library research task in front of you. Don't worry--just about everyone feels this way at some point! 

And it's O.K. to not feel completely confident about your topic. That is why we do research: to see what is already out there, and then come to a conclusion or make an argument. It may take several iterations before you settle on a final topic or thesis. That's why it's important to start as early as you can, so that you still have enough time for the searching and exploring stage.

See the Finding and Exploring Your Topic Research Guide for more in-depth help for this stage of your research.

Creating Keywords

Building a good search statement will help you find great resources related to your topic. The library's Search Strategy Generator  will help you translate your topic into search terms or keywords.  

Choosing an Argument

The library has some series of books and specialized databases which summarize both sides of an issue. These may help you develop a topic, and help you track down appropriate research.

To find relevant books go to  Library Catalog Search ,  and search one of the following:

" opposing viewpoints "

" contemporary world issues "

Databases & Websites

• Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices Encyclopedia covers major topics of contemporary importance to America society.
• CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window CQ Researcher is noted for its in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. The Pro/Con section offers succinct articles by experts arguing for and against given topics.
• Issues & Controversies This link opens in a new window Issues and Controversies offers accurate discussions of over 250 controversial topics in the news supplemented with chronologies, illustrations, maps, tables, contact information, and bibliographies including primary source documents and news editorials.
• Opposing Viewpoints in Context This link opens in a new window Covers current social and cultural issues, and includes pro and con "viewpoint" essays, topic overviews, primary sources, and news articles.
• ProCon.org: Pros and Cons of Controversial Issues ProCon.org presents both sides of a current "controversial" issue. The topics on this site include: politics, religion, medicine and health, sports, science, and education.

Narrowing Your Topic

Sometimes a topic that seems like the right size for your paper can seem way too big after you’ve learned a little more about it.   When this happens, you need to narrow the focus of your paper.   You can do this by considering different ways to restrict your paper topic.

Some of the ways you can limit your paper topic are by:

• Who – population or group (e.g., college students; women; Asian Americans)
• What – discipline or focus (e.g., sociological or historical perspective)
• Where – geographic location (e.g., United States; universities; small towns)
• When – time period or era (19 th century; Renaissance; Vietnam War)
• Why – why is the topic important? (to the class, to the field, or to you)

For example, a paper about alcohol use would be very broad.   But a paper about reasons for alcohol abuse by female college students in the United States during the 1990s might be just right.

Broadening Your Topic

Sometimes you will find that your topic is too narrow - there is not enough published on your topic.  When this happens, you can try to broaden your topic.  There are a couple of strategies you can try when broadening your topic.

One strategy is to choose less specific terms for your search, e.g., standardized tests instead of SATs, or performance-enhancing drugs instead of anabolic steroids.

Another strategy is to broaden your topic by changing or removing limits or filters from your topic:

• Who - population or group (e.g., instead of college students, choose a broader section of the population)
• What  - discipline or focus (e.g., instead of choosing a sociological perspective, look at a number of perspectives)
• Where  - geographic location (e.g., instead of Michigan, choose United States)
• When  - time period or era (e.g., instead of 1984, choose 1980s or 20th century)

For example, a paper about alcohol use by college students at the University of Michigan in 1984 might be too narrow of a focus.  But a paper about alcohol use by college students in the 1980s might be just right.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals

Library science articles from across Nature Portfolio

Latest research and reviews.

Digital financial inclusion in micro enterprises: understanding the determinants and impact on ease of doing business from World Bank survey

• Mohammad Asif
• Mohammad Wasiq

Big data visualisation in regional comprehensive economic partnership: a systematic review

What determines digital accounting systems’ continuance intention? An empirical investigation in SMEs

• Hamood Mohammed Al-Hattami
• Faozi A. Almaqtari

What makes deceptive online reviews? A linguistic analysis perspective

Understanding customer experience with Vietnamese hotels by analyzing online reviews

• Ha Thi Thu Nguyen
• Trung Xuan Nguyen

Climbing up the ladder of abstraction: how to span the boundaries of knowledge space in the online knowledge market?

• Haochuan Cui
• Cheng-Jun Wang

News and Comment

Pandemic publishing poses a new COVID-19 challenge

The scientific community’s response to COVID-19 has resulted in a large volume of research moving through the publication pipeline at extraordinary speed, with a median time from receipt to acceptance of 6 days for journal articles. Although the nature of this emergency warrants accelerated publishing, measures are required to safeguard the integrity of scientific evidence.

• Adam Palayew
• Ole Norgaard
• Jeffrey V. Lazarus

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Open Access is an initiative that aims to make scientific research freely available to all. To date our community has made over 100 million downloads. It’s based on principles of collaboration, unobstructed discovery, and, most importantly, scientific progression. As PhD students, we found it difficult to access the research we needed, so we decided to create a new Open Access publisher that levels the playing field for scientists across the world. How? By making research easy to access, and puts the academic needs of the researchers before the business interests of publishers.

We are a community of more than 103,000 authors and editors from 3,291 institutions spanning 160 countries, including Nobel Prize winners and some of the world’s most-cited researchers. Publishing on IntechOpen allows authors to earn citations and find new collaborators, meaning more people see your work not only from your own field of study, but from other related fields too.

Brief introduction to this section that descibes Open Access especially from an IntechOpen perspective

Want to get in touch? Contact our London head office or media team here

Our team is growing all the time, so we’re always on the lookout for smart people who want to help us reshape the world of scientific publishing.

Home > Books > Qualitative versus Quantitative Research

Research Methods in Library and Information Science

Submitted: 28 October 2016 Reviewed: 23 March 2017 Published: 28 June 2017

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.68749

Cite this chapter

There are two ways to cite this chapter:

From the Edited Volume

Qualitative versus Quantitative Research

Edited by Sonyel Oflazoglu

To purchase hard copies of this book, please contact the representative in India: CBS Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd. www.cbspd.com | [email protected]

Chapter metrics overview

5,829 Chapter Downloads

Impact of this chapter

Total Chapter Downloads on intechopen.com

Total Chapter Views on intechopen.com

Overall attention for this chapters

Library and information science (LIS) is a very broad discipline, which uses a wide rangeof constantly evolving research strategies and techniques. The aim of this chapter is to provide an updated view of research issues in library and information science. A stratified random sample of 440 articles published in five prominent journals was analyzed and classified to identify (i) research approach, (ii) research methodology, and (iii) method of data analysis. For each variable, a coding scheme was developed, and the articles were coded accordingly. A total of 78% of the articles reported empirical research. The rest 22% were classified as non‐empirical research papers. The five most popular topics were “information retrieval,” “information behaviour,” “information literacy,” “library services,” and “organization and management.” An overwhelming majority of the empirical research articles employed a quantitative approach. Although the survey emerged as the most frequently used research strategy, there is evidence that the number and variety of research methodologies have been increased. There is also evidence that qualitative approaches are gaining increasing importance and have a role to play in LIS, while mixed methods have not yet gained enough recognition in LIS research.

• library and information science
• research methods
• research strategies
• data analysis techniques
• research articles

Author Information

Aspasia togia *.

• Department of Library Science & Information Systems, Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Thessaloniki, Greece

Afrodite Malliari

• DataScouting, Thessaloniki, Greece

*Address all correspondence to: [email protected]

1. Introduction

Library and information science (LIS), as its name indicates, is a merging of librarianship and information science that took place in the 1960s [ 1 , 2 ]. LIS is a field of both professional practice and scientific inquiry. As a field of practice, it includes the profession of librarianship as well as a number of other information professions, all of which assume the interplay of the following:

information content,

the people who interact with the content, and

the technology used to facilitate the creation, communication, storage, or transformation of the content [ 3 ].

The disciplinary foundation of LIS, which began in the 1920s, aimed at providing a theoretical foundation for the library profession. LIS has evolved in close relationship with other fields of research, especially computer science, communication studies, and cognitive sciences [ 4 ].

The connection of LIS with professional practice, on one hand, and other research fields on the other has influenced its research orientation and the development of methodological tools and theoretical perspectives [ 5 ]. Research problems are diverse, depending on the research direction, local trends, etc. Most of them relate to the professional practice although there are theoretical research statements as well. LIS research strives to address important information issues, such as these of “ information retrieval, information quality and authenticity, policy for access and preservation, the health and security applications of data mining ”(p. 3) [ 6 ]. The research is multidisciplinary in nature, and it has been heavily influenced by research designs developed in the social, behavioral, and management sciences and to a lesser extent by the theoretical inquiry adopted in the humanities [ 7 ]. Methods used in information retrieval research have been adapted from computer science. The emergence of evidence‐based librarianship in the late 1990s brought a positivist approach to LIS research, since it incorporated many of the research designs and methods used in clinical medicine [ 7 , 8 ]. In addition, LIS has developed its own methodological approaches, a prominent example of which is bibliometrics. Bibliometrics, which can be defined as “ the use of mathematical and statistical methods to study documents and patterns of publication ” (p. 38) [ 9 ], is a native research methodology, which has been extensively used outside the field, especially in science studies [ 10 ].

Library and information science research has been often criticized as being fragmentary, narrowly focused, and oriented to practical problems [ 11 ]. Many authors have noticed limited use of theory in published research and have advocated greater use of theory as a conceptual basis in LIS research [ 4 , 11 – 14 ]. Feehan et al. [ 13 ] claimed that LIS literature has not evolved enough to support a rigid body of its own theoretical basis. Jarvelin and Vakkari [ 15 ] argued that LIS theories are usually vague and conceptually unclear, and that research in LIS has been dominated by a paradigm which “ has made little use of such traditional scientific approaches as foundations and conceptual analysis, or of scientific explanation and theory formulation ” (p. 415). This lack of theoretical contributions may be associated with the fact that LIS emanated from professional practice and is therefore closely linked to practical problems such as the processing and organization of library materials, documentation, and information retrieval [ 15 , 16 ].

In this chapter, after briefly discussing the role of theory in LIS research, we provide an updated view of research issues in the field that will help scholars and students stay informed about topics related to research strategies and methods. To accomplish this, we describe and analyze patterns of LIS research activity as reflected in prominent library journals. The analysis of the articles highlights trends and recurring themes in LIS research regarding the use of multiple methods, the adoption of qualitative approaches, and the employment of advanced techniques for data analysis and interpretation [ 17 ].

2. The role of theory in LIS research

The presence of theory is an indication of research eminence and respectability [ 18 ], as well as a feature of discipline’s maturity [ 19 , 20 ]. Theory has been defined in many ways. “ Any of the following have been used as the meaning of theory: a law, a hypothesis, group of hypotheses, proposition, supposition, explanation, model, assumption, conjecture, construct, edifice, structure, opinion, speculation, belief, principle, rule, point of view, generalization, scheme, or idea ” (p. 309) [ 21 ]. A theory can be described as “ a set of interrelated concepts, definitions, and propositions that explains or predicts events or situations by specifying relations among variables ” [ 22 ]. According to Babbie [ 23 ], research is “ a systematic explanation for the observed facts and laws that related to a particular aspect of life ” (p. 49). It is “ a multiple‐level component of the research process, comprising a range of generalizations that move beyond a descriptive level to a more explanatory level ” [ 24 ] (p. 319). The role of theory in social sciences is, among other things, to explain and predict behavior, be usable in practical applications, and guide research [ 25 ]. According to Smiraglia [ 26 ], theory does not exist in a vacuum but in a system that explains the domains of human actions, the phenomena found in these domains, and the ways in which they are affected. He maintains that theory is developed by systematically observing phenomena, either in the positivist empirical research paradigm or in the qualitative hermeneutic paradigm. Theory is used to formulate hypotheses in quantitative research and confirms observations in qualitative research.

Glazier and Grover [ 24 ] proposed a model for theory‐building in LIS called “circuits of theory.” The model includes taxonomy of theory, developed earlier by the authors [ 11 ], and the critical social and psychological factors that influence research. The purpose of the taxonomy was to demonstrate the relationships among the concepts of research, theory, paradigms, and phenomena. Phenomena are described as “ events experienced in the empirical world ” (p. 230) [ 11 ]. Researchers assign symbols (digital or iconic representations, usually words or pictures) to phenomena, and meaning to symbols, and then they conceptualize the relationships among phenomena and formulate hypotheses and research questions. “ In the taxonomy, empirical research begins with the formation of research questions to be answered about the concepts or hypotheses for testing the concepts within a narrow set of predetermined parameters ” (p. 323) [ 24 ]. Various levels of theories, with implications for research in library and information Science, are described. The first theory level, called substantive theory , is defined as “ a set of propositions which furnish an explanation for an applied area of inquiry ” (p. 233) [ 11 ]. In fact, it may not be viewed as a theory but rather be considered as a research hypothesis that has been tested or even a research finding [ 16 ]. The next level of theory, called formal theory , is defined as “ a set of propositions which furnish an explanation for a formal or conceptual area of inquiry, that is, a discipline ” (p. 234) [ 11 ]. Substantive and formal theories together are usually considered as “middle range” theory in the social sciences. Their difference lies in the ability to structure generalizations and the potential for explanation and prediction. The final level, grand theory , is “ a set of theories or generalizations that transcend the borders of disciplines to explain relationships among phenomena ” (p. 321) [ 24 ]. According to the authors, most research generates substantive level theory, or, alternatively, researchers borrow theory from the appropriate discipline, apply it to the problem under investigation, and reconstruct the theory at the substantive level. Next in the hierarchy of theoretical categories is the paradigm , which is described as “ a framework of basic assumptions with which perceptions are evaluated and relationships are delineated and applied to a discipline or profession ” (p. 234) [ 11 ]. Finally, the most significant theoretical category is the world view , which is defined as “ an individual’s accepted knowledge, including values and assumptions, which provide a ‘filter’ for perception of all phenomena ” (p. 235) [ 11 ]. All the previous categories contribute to shaping the individual’s worldview. In the revised model, which places more emphasis on the impact of social environment on the research process, research and theory building is surrounded by a system of three basic contextual modules: the self, society, and knowledge, both discovered and undiscovered. The interactions and dialectical relationships of these three modules affect the research process and create a dynamic environment that fosters theory creation and development. The authors argue that their model will help researchers build theories that enable generalizations beyond the conclusions drawn from empirical data [ 24 ].

In an effort to propose a framework for a unified theory of librarianship, McGrath [ 27 ] reviewed research articles in the areas of publishing, acquisitions, classification and knowledge organization, storage, preservation and collection management, library collections, and circulations. In his study, he included articles that employed explanatory and predictive statistical methods to explore relationships between variables within and between the above subfields of LIS. For each paper reviewed, he identified the dependent variable, significant independent variables, and the units of analysis. The review displayed explanatory studies “ in nearly every level, with the possible exception of classification, while studies in circulation and use of the library were clearly dominant. A recapitulation showed that a variable at one level may be a unit of analysis at another, a property of explanatory research crucial to the development of theory, which has been either ignored or unrecognized in LIS literature ” (p. 368) [ 27 ]. The author concluded that “explanatory and predictive relationships do exist and that they can be useful in constructing a comprehensive unified theory of librarianship” (p. 368) [ 27 ].

Recent LIS literature provides several analyses of theory development and use in the field. In a longitudinal analysis of information needs and uses of literature, Julien and Duggan [ 28 ] investigated, among other things, to what extent LIS literature was grounded in theory. Articles “ based on a coherent and explicit framework of assumptions, definitions, and propositions that, taken together, have some explanatory power ” (p. 294) were classified as theoretical articles. Results showed that only 18.3% of the research studies identified in the sample of articles examined were theoretically grounded.

Pettigrew and McKechnie [ 29 ] analyzed 1160 journal articles published between 1993 and 1998 to determine the level of theory use in information science research. In the absence of a singular definition of theory that would cover all the different uses of the term in the sample of articles, they operationalized “theory” according to authors’ use of the term. They found that 34.1% of the articles incorporated theory, with the largest percentage of theories drawn from the social sciences. Information science itself was the second most important source of theories. The authors argued that this significant increase in theory use in comparison to earlier studies could be explained by the research‐oriented journals they selected for examination, the sample time, and the broad way in which they defined “theory.” With regard to this last point, that is, their approach of identifying theories only if the author(s) describe them as such in the article, Pettigrew and McKechnie [ 29 ] observed significant differences in how information science researchers perceive theory:

Although it is possible that conceptual differences regarding the nature of theory may be due to the different disciplinary backgrounds of researchers in IS, other themes emerged from our data that suggest a general confusion exists about theory even within subfields. Numerous examples came to light during our analysis in which an author would simultaneously refer to something as a theory and a method, or as a theory and a model, or as a theory and a reported finding. In other words, it seems as though authors, themselves, are sometimes unsure about what constitutes theory. Questions even arose regarding whether the author to whom a theory was credited would him or herself consider his or her work as theory (p. 68).

Kim and Jeong [ 16 ] examined the state and characteristics of theoretical research in LIS journals between 1984 and 2003. They focused on the “theory incident,” which is described as “an event in which the author contributes to the development or the use of theory in his/her paper.” Their study adopted Glazier and Grover’s [ 24 ] model of “circuits of theory.” Substantive level theory was operationalized to a tested hypothesis or an observed relationship, while both formal and grand level theories were identified when they were named as “theory,” “model,” or “law” by authors other than those who had developed them. Results demonstrated that the application of theory was present in 41.4% of the articles examined, signifying a significant increase in the proportion of theoretical articles as compared to previous studies. Moreover, it was evident that both theory development and theory use had increased by the year. Information seeking and use, and information retrieval, were identified as the subfields with the most significant contribution to the development of the theoretical framework.

In a more in‐depth analysis of theory use in Kumasi et al. [ 30 ] qualitatively analyzed the extent to which theory is meaningfully used in scholarly literature. For this purpose, they developed a theory talk coding scheme, which included six analytical categories, describing how theory is discussed in a study. The intensity of theory talk in the articles was described across a continuum from minimal (e.g., theory is discussed in literature review and not mentioned later) through moderate (e.g., multiple theories are introduced but without discussing their relevance to the study) to major (e.g., theory is employed throughout the study). Their findings seem to support the opinion that “ LIS discipline has been focused on the application of specific theoretical frameworks rather than the generation of new theories ” (p. 179) [ 30 ]. Another point the authors made was about the multiple terms used in the articles to describe theory. Words such as “framework,” “model,” or “theory” were used interchangeably by scholars.

It is evident from the above discussion that the treatment of theory in LIS research covers a spectrum of intensity, from marginal mentions to theory revising, expanding, or building. Recent analyses of the published scholarship indicate that the field has not been very successful in contributing to existing theory or producing new theory. In spite of this, one may still assert that LIS research employs theory, and, in fact, there are many theories that have been used or generated by LIS scholars. However, “ calls for additional and novel theory development work in LIS continue, particularly for theories that might help to address the research practice gap ” (p. 12) [ 31 ].

3. Research strategies in LIS

3.1. surveys of research methods.

LIS is a very broad discipline, which uses a wide range of constantly evolving research strategies and techniques [ 32 ]. Various classification schemes have been developed to analyze methods employed in LIS research (e.g., [ 13 , 15 , 17 , 33 – 35 , 38 ]). Back in 1996, in the “research record” column of the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, Kim [ 36 ] synthesized previous categories and definitions and introduced a list of research strategies, including data collection and analysis methods. The listing included four general research strategies: (i) theoretical/philosophical inquiry (development of conceptual models or frameworks), (ii) bibliographic research (descriptive studies of books and their properties as well as bibliographies of various kinds), (iii) R&D (development of storage and retrieval systems, software, interface, etc.), and (iv) action research, it aims at solving problems and bringing about change in organizations. Strategies are then divided into quantitative and qualitative driven. In the first category are included descriptive studies, predictive/explanatory studies, bibliometric studies, content analysis, and operation research studies. Qualitative‐driven strategies are considered the following: case study, biographical method, historical method, grounded theory, ethnography, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism/semiotics, sociolinguistics/discourse analysis/ethnographic semantics/ethnography of communication, and hermeneutics/interpretive interactionism (p. 378–380) [ 36 ].

Systematic studies of research methods in LIS started in the 1980s and several reviews of the literature have been conducted over the past years to analyze the topics, methodologies, and quality of research. One of the earliest studies was done by Peritz [ 37 ] who carried out a bibliometric analysis of the articles published in 39 core LIS journals between 1950 and 1975. She examined the methodologies used, the type of library or organization investigated, the type of activity investigated, and the institutional affiliation of the authors. The most important findings were a clear orientation toward library and information service activities, a widespread use of the survey methodology, a considerable increase of research articles after 1960, and a significant increase in theoretical studies after 1965.

Nour [ 38 ] followed up on Peritz’s [ 37 ] work and studied research articles published in 41 selected journals during the year 1980. She found that survey and theoretical/analytic methodologies were the most popular, followed by bibliometrics. Comparing these findings to those made by Peritz [ 37 ], Nour [ 38 ] found that the amount of research continued to increase, but the proportion of research articles to all articles had been decreasing since 1975.

Feehan et al. [ 13 ] described how LIS research published during 1984 was distributed over various topics and what methods had been used to study these topics. Their analysis revealed a predominance of survey and historical methods and a notable percentage of articles using more than one research method. Following a different approach, Enger et al. (1989) focused on the statistical methods used by LIS researchers in articles published during 1985 [ 39 ]. They found that only one out of three of the articles reported any use of statistics. Of those, 21% used descriptive statistics and 11% inferential statistics. In addition, the authors found that researchers from disciplines other than LIS made the highest use of statistics and LIS faculty showed the highest use of inferential statistics.

An influential work, against which later studies have been compared, is that of Jarvelin and Vakkari [ 15 ] who studied LIS articles published in 1985 in order to determine how research was distributed over various subjects, what approaches had been taken by the authors, and what research strategies had been used. The authors replicated their study later to include older research published between 1965 and 1985 [ 40 ]. The main finding of these studies was that the trends and characteristics of LIS research remained more or less the same over the aforementioned period of 20 years. The most common topics were information service activities and information storage and retrieval. Empirical research strategies were predominant, and of them, the most frequent was the survey. Kumpulainen [ 41 ], in an effort to provide a continuum with Jarvelin and Vakkeri’s [ 15 ] study, analyzed 632 articles sampled from 30 core LIS journals with respect to various characteristics, including topics, aspect of activity, research method, data selection method, and data analysis techniques. She used the same classification scheme, and she selected the journals based on a slightly modified version of Jarvelin and Vakkari’s [ 15 ] list. Library services and information storage and retrieval emerged again as the most common subjects approached by the authors and survey was the most frequently used method.

More recent studies of this nature include those conducted by Koufogiannakis et al. [ 42 ], Hildreth and Aytac [ 43 ], Hider and Pymm [ 32 ], and Chu [ 17 ]. Koufogiannakis et al. [ 42 ] examined research articles published in 2001 and they found that the majority of them were questionnaire‐based descriptive studies. Comparative, bibliometrics, content analysis, and program evaluation studies were also popular. Information storage and retrieval emerged as the predominant subject area, followed by library collections and management. Hildreth and Aytac [ 43 ] presented a review of the 2003–2005 published library research with special focus on methodology issues and the quality of published articles of both practitioners and academic scholars. They found that most research was descriptive and the most frequent method for data collection was the questionnaire, followed by content analysis and interviews. With regard to data analysis, more researchers used quantitative methods, considerably less used qualitative‐only methods, whereas 61 out of 206 studies included some kind of qualitative analysis, raising the total percentage of qualitative methods to nearly 50%. With regard to the quality of published research, the authors argued that “ the majority of the reports are detailed, comprehensive, and well‐organized ” (p. 254) [ 43 ]. Still, they noticed that the majority of reports did not mention the critical issues of research validity and reliability and neither did they indicate study limitations or future research recommendations. Hider and Pymm [ 32 ] described content analysis of LIS literature “ which aimed to identify the most common strategies and techniques employed by LIS researchers carrying out high‐profile empirical research ” (p. 109). Their results suggested that while researchers employed a wide variety of strategies, they mostly used surveys and experiments. They also observed that although quantitative research accounted for more than 50% of the articles, there was an increase in the use of most sophisticated qualitative methods. Chu [ 17 ] analyzed the research articles published between 2001 and 2010 in three major journals and reported the following most frequent research methods: theoretical approach (e.g., conceptual analysis), content analysis, questionnaire, interview, experiment, and bibliometrics. Her study showed an increase in both the number and variety of research methods but lack of growth in the use of qualitative research or in the adoption of multiple research methods.

In summary, the literature shows a continued interest in the analysis of published LIS research. Approaches include focusing on particular publication years, geographic areas, journal titles, aspects of LIS, and specific characteristics, such as subjects, authorship, and research methods. Despite the abundance of content analyses of LIS literature, the findings are not easily comparable due to differences in the number and titles of journals examined, in the types of the papers selected for analysis, in the periods covered, and in classification schemes developed by the authors to categorize article topics and research strategies. Despite the differences, some findings are consistent among all studies:

Information seeking, information retrieval, and library and information service activities are among the most common subjects studied,

Descriptive research methodologies based on surveys and questionnaires predominate,

Over the years, there has been a considerable increase in the array of research approaches used to explore library issues, and

Data analysis is usually limited to descriptive statistics, including frequencies, means, and standard deviations.

3.2. Data collection and analysis

Articles published between 2011 and 2016 were obtained from the following journals: Library and Information Science Research, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Documentation, Information Processing & Management, and Journal of Academic Librarianship ( Table 1 ). These five titles were selected as data sources because they have the highest 5‐year impact factor of the journals classified in Ulrich’s Serials Directory under the “Library and Information Sciences” subject heading. From the journals selected, only full‐length articles were collected. Editorials, book reviews, letters, interviews, commentaries, and news items were excluded from the analysis. This selection process yielded 1643 articles. A stratified random sample of 440 articles was chosen for in‐depth analysis ( Table 2 ). For the purpose of this study, five strata, corresponding to the five journals, were used. The sample size was determined using a margin of error, 4%, and confidence interval, 95%.

Table 1.

Profile of the journals.

Table 2.

Journal titles.

Each article was classified as either research or theoretical. Articles that employed specific research methodology and presented specific findings of original studies performed by the author(s) were considered research articles. The kind of study may vary (e.g., it could be an experiment, a survey, etc.), but in all cases, raw data had been collected and analyzed, and conclusions were drawn from the results of that analysis. Articles reporting research in system design or evaluation in the information systems field were also regarded as research articles . On the other hand, works that reviewed theories, theoretical concepts, or principles discussed topics of interest to researchers and professionals, or described research methodologies were regarded as theoretical articles [ 44 ] and were classified in the no‐empirical‐research category. In this category, were also included literature reviews and articles describing a project, a situation, a process, etc.

Each article was classified into a topical category according to its main subject. The articles classified as research were then further explored and analyzed to identify (i) research approach, (ii) research methodology, and (iii) method of data analysis. For each variable, a coding scheme was developed, and the articles were coded accordingly. The final list of the analysis codes was extracted inductively from the data itself, using as reference the taxonomies utilized in previous studies [ 15 , 32 , 43 , 45 ]. Research approaches “ are plans and procedures for research ” (p. 3) [ 46 ]. Research approaches can generally be grouped as qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies. Quantitative studies aim at the systematic empirical investigation of quantitative properties or phenomena and their relationships. Qualitative research can be broadly defined as “ any kind of research that produces findings not arrived at by means of statistical procedures or other means of quantification ” (p. 17) [ 47 ]. It is a way to gain insights through discovering meanings and explaining phenomena based on the attributes of the data. In mixed model research, quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined within or across the stages of the research process. It was beyond the scope of this study to identify in which stages of a study—data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation—the mixing was applied or to reveal the types of mixing. Therefore, studies using both quantitative and qualitative methods, irrespective of whether they describe if and how the methods were integrated, were coded as mixed methods studies.

Research methodologies , or strategies of inquiry, are types of research models “ that provide specific direction for procedures in a research design ” (p. 11) [ 46 ] and inform the decisions concerning data collection and analysis. A coding schema of research methodologies was developed by the authors based on the analysis of all research articles included in the sample. The methodology classification included 12 categories ( Table 3 ). Each article was classified into one category for the variable research methodology . If more than one research strategy was mentioned (e.g., experiment and survey), the article was classified according to the main strategy.

Table 3.

Coding schema for research methodologies.

Methods of data analysis refer to the techniques used by the researchers to explore the original data and answer their research problems or questions. Data analysis for quantitative researches involves statistical analysis and interpretation of figures and numbers. In qualitative studies, on the other hand, data analysis involves identifying common patterns within the data and making interpretations of the meanings of the data. The array of data analysis methods included the following categories:

Descriptive statistics,

Inferential statistics,

Qualitative data analysis,

Experimental evaluation, and

Other methods,

Descriptive statistics are used to describe the basic features of the data in a study. Inferential statistics investigate questions, models, and hypotheses. Mathematical analysis refers to mathematic functions, etc. used mainly in bibliometric studies to answer research questions associated with citation data. Qualitative data analysis is the range of processes and procedures used for the exploration of qualitative data, from coding and descriptive analysis to identification of patterns and themes and the testing of emergent findings and hypotheses. It was used in this study as an overarching term encompassing various types of analysis, such as thematic analysis, discourse analysis, or grounded theory analysis. The class experimental evaluation was used for system and software analysis and design studies which assesses the newly developed algorithm, tool, method, etc. by performing experiments on selected datasets. In these cases, “experiments” differ from the experimental designs in social sciences. Methods that did not fall into one of these categories (e.g., mathematical analysis, visualization, or benchmarking) were classified as other methods . If both descriptive and inferential statistics were used in an article, only the inferential were recorded. In mixed methods studies, each method was recorded in the order in which it was reported in the article.

Ten percent of the articles were randomly selected and used to establish inter‐rater reliability and provide basic validation of the coding schema. Cohen’s kappa was calculated for each coded variable. The average Cohen’s kappa value was κ = 0.60, p < 0.000 (the highest was 0.63 and lowest was 0.59). This indicates a substantial agreement [ 48 ]. The coding disparities across raters were discussed, and the final codes were determined via consensus.

3.3. Results

3.3.1. topic.

Table 4 presents the distribution of articles over the various topics, for each of which a detailed description is provided. The five most popular topics of the papers in the total sample of 440 articles were “information retrieval,” “information behavior,” “information literacy,” “library services,” and “organization and management.” These areas cover over 60% of all topics studied in the papers. The least‐studied topics (covered in less than eight papers) fall into the categories of “information and knowledge management,” “library information systems,” “LIS theory,” and “infometrics.”

Table 4.

Article topics.

Figure 1 shows how the top five topics are distributed across journals. As expected, the topic “information retrieval” has higher publication frequencies in Information Processing & Management, a journal focusing on system design and issues related to the tools and techniques used in storage and retrieval of information. “Information literacy,” “information behavior,” “library services,” and “organization and management” appear to be distributed almost proportionately in College & Research Libraries. “Information literacy” seems to be a more preferred topic in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, while “information behavior” is more popular in the Journal of Documentation and Library & Information Science Research.

Figure 1.

Distribution of topics across journals.

3.3.2. Research approach and methodology

Of all articles examined, 343 articles, which represent the 78% of the sample, reported empirical research. The rest 22% (N = 97) were classified as non‐empirical research papers. Research articles were coded as quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods studies. An overwhelming majority (70%) of the empirical research articles employed a quantitative research approach. Qualitative and mixed methods research was reported in 21.6 and 8.5% of the articles, respectively ( Figure 2 ).

Figure 2.

Research approach.

Table 5 presents the distribution of research approaches over the five most famous topics. The quantitative approach clearly prevails in all topics, especially in information retrieval research. However, qualitative designs seem to gain acceptance in all topics (except information retrieval), while in information behavior research, quantitative and qualitative approaches are almost evenly distributed. Mixed methods were quite frequent in information literacy and information behavior studies and less popular in the other topics.

Table 5.

Topics across research approach.

The most frequently used research strategy was survey, accounting for almost 37% of all research articles, followed by system and software analysis and design, a strategy used in this study specifically for research in information systems (Jarvelin & Vakkari, 1990). This result is influenced by the fact that Information Processing & Management addresses issues at the intersection between LIS and computer science, and the majority of its articles present the development of new tools, algorithms, methods and systems, and their experimental evaluation. The third‐ and fourth‐ranking strategies were content analysis and bibliometrics. Case study, experiment, and secondary data analysis were represented by 15 articles each, while the rest of the techniques were underrepresented with considerably fewer articles ( Table 6 ).

Table 6.

Research methodologies.

3.3.3. Methods of data analysis

Table 7 displays the frequencies for each type of data analysis.

Table 7.

Method of data analysis.

Almost half of the empirical research papers examined reported any use of statistics. Descriptive statistics, such as frequencies, means, or standard deviations, were more frequently used compared to inferential statistics, such as ANOVA, regression, or factor analysis. Nearly one‐third of the articles employed some type of qualitative data analysis either as the only method or—in mixed methods studies—in combination with quantitative techniques.

3.4. Discussions and conclusions

The patterns of LIS research activity as reflected in the articles published between 2011 and 2016 in five well‐established, peer‐reviewed journals were described and analyzed. LIS literature addresses many and diverse topics. Information retrieval, information behavior, and library services continue to attract the interest of researchers as they are core areas in library science. Information retrieval has been rated as one of the most famous areas of interest in research articles published between 1965 and 1985 [ 40 ]. According to Dimitroff [ 49 ], information retrieval was the second most popular topic in the articles published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, while Cano [ 50 ] argued that LIS research produced in Spain from 1977 to 1994 was mostly centered on information retrieval and library and information services. In addition, Koufogiannakis et al. [ 42 ] found that information access and retrieval were the domain with the most research, and in Hildreth and Aytac’s [ 43 ] study, most articles were dealing with issues related to users (needs, behavior, information seeking, etc.), services, and collections. The present study provides evidence that the amount of research in information literacy is increasing, presumably due to the growing importance of information literacy instruction in libraries. In recent years, there is an ongoing educational role for librarians, who are more and more actively engaging in the teaching and learning processes, a trend that is reflected in the research output.

With regard to research methodologies, the present study seems to confirm the well‐documented predominance of survey in LIS research. According to Dimitroff [ 49 ], the percentage related to use of survey research methods reported in various studies varied between 20.3 and 41.5%. Powell [ 51 ], in a review of the research methods appearing in LIS literature, pointed out that survey had consistently been the most common type of study in both dissertations and journal articles. Survey reported the most widely used research design by Jarvelin and Vakkari [ 40 ], Crawford [ 52 ], Hildreth and Aytac [ 43 ], and Hider and Pymm [ 32 ]. The majority of articles examined by Koufogiannakis et al. [ 42 ] were descriptive studies using questionnaires/surveys. In addition, survey methods represented the largest proportion of methods used in information behavior articles analyzed by Julien et al. [ 53 ]. There is no doubt that survey has been used more than any other method in LIS research. As Jarvelin and Vakkari [ 15 ] put it, “it appears that the field is so survey‐oriented that almost all problems are seen through a survey viewpoint” (p. 416). Much of survey’s popularity can be ascribed to its being a well‐known, understood, easily conducted, and inexpensive method, which is easy to analyze results [ 41 , 42 ]. However, our findings suggest that while the survey ranks high, a variety of other methods have been also used in the research articles. Content analysis emerged as the third‐most frequent strategy, a finding similar to those of previous studies [ 17 , 32 ]. Although content analysis was not regarded by LIS researchers as a favored research method until recently, its popularity seems to be growing [ 17 ].

Quantitative approaches, which dominate, tend to rely on frequency counts, percentages, and descriptive statistics used to describe the basic features of the data in a study. Fewer studies used advanced statistical analysis techniques, such as t‐tests, correlation, and regressions, while there were some examples of more sophisticated methods, such as factor analysis, ANOVA, MANOVA, and structural equation modeling. Researchers engaging in quantitative research designs should take into consideration the use of inferential statistics, which enables the generalization from the sample being studied to the population of interest and, if used appropriately, are very useful for hypothesis testing. In addition, multivariate statistics are suitable for examining the relationships among variables, revealing patterns and understanding complex phenomena.

The findings also suggest that qualitative approaches are gaining increasing importance and have a role to play in LIS studies. These results are comparable to the findings of Hider and Pymm [ 32 ], who observed significant increases for qualitative research strategies in contemporary LIS literature. Qualitative analysis description varied widely, reflecting the diverse perspectives, analysis methods, and levels of depth of analysis. Commonly used terms in the articles included coding, content analysis, thematic analysis, thematic analytical approach, theme, or pattern identification. One could argue that the efforts made to encourage and promote qualitative methods in LIS research [ 54 , 55 ] have made some impact. However, qualitative research methods do not seem to be adequately utilized by library researchers and practitioners, despite their potential to offer far more illuminating ways to study library‐related issues [ 56 ]. LIS research has much to gain from the interpretive paradigm underpinning qualitative methods. This paradigm assumes that social reality is

the product of processes by which social actors together negotiate the meanings for actions and situations; it is a complex of socially constructed meanings. Human experience involves a process of interpretation rather than sensory, material apprehension of the external physical world and human behavior depends on how individuals interpret the conditions in which they find themselves. Social reality is not some ‘thing’ that may be interpreted in different ways, it is those interpretations (p. 96) [ 57 ].

As stated in the introduction of this chapter, library and information science focuses on the interaction between individuals and information. In every area of LIS research, the connection of factors that lead to and influence this interaction is increasingly complex. Qualitative research searches for “ all aspects of that complexity on the grounds that they are essential to understanding the behavior of which they are a part ” (p. 241) [ 59 ]. Qualitative research designs can offer a more in‐depth analysis of library users, their needs, attitudes, and behaviors.

The use of mixed methods designs was found to be rather rare. While Hildreth and Aytac [ 43 ] found higher percentages of studies using combined methods in data analysis, our results are analogous to those shown by Fidel [ 60 ]. In fact, as in her study, only few of the articles analyzed referred to mixed methods research by name, a finding indicating that “ the concept has not yet gained recognition in LIS research ” (p. 268). Mixed methods research has become an established research approach in the social sciences as it minimizes the weaknesses of quantitative and qualitative research alone and allows researchers to investigate the phenomena more completely [ 58 ].

In conclusion, there is evidence that LIS researchers employ a large number and wide variety of research methodologies. Each research approach, strategy, and method has its advantages and limitations. If the aim of the study is to confirm hypotheses about phenomena or measure and analyze the causal relationships between variables, then quantitative methods might be used. If the research seeks to explore, understand, and explain phenomena then qualitative methods might be used. Researchers can consider the full range of possibilities and make their selection based on the philosophical assumptions they bring to the study, the research problem being addressed, their personal experiences, and the intended audience for the study [ 46 ].

Taking into consideration the increasing use of qualitative methods in LIS studies, an in‐depth analysis of papers using qualitative methods would be interesting. A future study in which the different research strategies and types of analysis used in qualitative methods will be presented and analyzed could help LIS practitioners understand the benefits of qualitative analysis.

Mixed methods used in LIS research papers could be analyzed in future studies in order to identify in which stages of a study, data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation, the mixing was applied and to reveal the types of mixing.

As far as it concerns the quantitative research methods, which predominate in LIS research, it would be interesting to identify systematic relations between more than two variables such as authors’ affiliation, topic, research strategies, etc. and to create homogeneous groups using multivariate data analysis techniques.

• 1. Buckland MK, Liu ZM. History of information science. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. 1995; 30 :385-416
• 2. Rayward WB. The history and historiography of information science: Some reflections. Information Processing & Management. 1996; 32 (1):3-17
• 3. Wildemuth BM. Applications of Social Research Methods to Questions in Information and Library Science. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited; 2009
• 4. Hjørland B. Theory and metatheory of information science: A new interpretation. Journal of Documentation. 1998; 54 (5):606-621. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007183
• 5. Åström F. Heterogeneity and homogeneity in library and information science research. Information Research [Internet]. 2007 [cited 23 April 2017]; 12 (4): poster colisp01 [3 p.]. Available from: http://www.informationr.net/ir/12-4/colis/colisp01.html
• 6. Dillon A. Keynote address: Library and information science as a research domain: Problems and prospects. Information Research [Internet]. 2007 [cited 23 April 2017]; 12 (4): paper colis03 [6 p.]. Available from: http://www.informationr.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis03.html
• 7. Eldredge JD. Evidence‐based librarianship: An overview. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. 2000; 88 (4):289-302
• 8. Bradley J, Marshall JG. Using scientific evidence to improve information practice. Health Libraries Review. 1995; 12 (3):147-157
• 9. Bibliometrics. In: International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science. 2nd ed. London, UK: Routledge; 2003. p. 38
• 10. Åström F. Library and Information Science in context: The development of scientific fields, and their relations to professional contexts. In: Rayward WB, editor. Aware and Responsible: Papers of the Nordic‐International Colloquium on Social and Cultural Awareness and Responsibility in Library, Information and Documentation Studies (SCARLID). Oxford, UK: Scarecrow Press; 2004. pp. 1-27
• 11. Grover R, Glazier J. A conceptual framework for theory building in library and information science. Library and Information Science Research. 1986; 8 (3):227-242
• 12. Boyce BR, Kraft DH. Principles and theories in information science. In: W ME, editor. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Medford, NJ: Knowledge Industry Publications. 1985; pp. 153-178
• 13. Feehan PE, Gragg WL, Havener WM, Kester DD. Library and information science research: An analysis of the 1984 journal literature. Library and Information Science Research. 1987; 9 (3):173-185
• 14. Spink A. Information science: A third feedback framework. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 1997; 48 (8):728-740
• 15. Jarvelin K, Vakkari P. Content analysis of research articles in Library and Information Science. Library and Information Science Research. 1990; 12 (4):395-421
• 16. Kim SJ, Jeong DY. An analysis of the development and use of theory in library and information science research articles. Library and Information Science Research. 2006; 28 (4):548-562. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2006.03.018
• 17. Chu H. Research methods in library and information science: A content analysis. Library & Information Science Research. 2015; 37 (1):36-41. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2014.09.003
• 18. Van Maanen J. Different strokes: Qualitative research in the administrative science quarterly from 1956 to 1996. In: Van Maanen J, editor. Qualitative Studies of Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; 1998. pp. ix‐xxxii
• 19. Brookes BC. The foundations of information science Part I. Philosophical aspects. Journal of Information Science. 1980; 2 (3/4):125-133
• 20. Hauser L. A conceptual analysis of information science. Library and Information Science Research. 1988; 10 (1):3-35
• 21. McGrath WE. Current theory in Library and Information Science. Introduction. Library Trends. 2002; 50 (3):309-316
• 22. Theory and why it is important - Social and behavioral theories - e-Source Book - OBSSR e-Source [Internet]. Esourceresearch.org. 2017 [cited 23 April 2017]. Available from: http://www.esourceresearch.org/eSourceBook/SocialandBehavioralTheories/3TheoryandWhyItisImportant/tabid/727/Default.aspx
• 23. Babbie E. The practice of social research. 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth; 1995
• 24. Glazier JD, Grover R. A multidisciplinary framework for theory building. Library Trends. 2002; 50 (3):317-329
• 25. Glaser B, Strauss AL. The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction; 1999
• 26. Smiraglia RP. The progress of theory in knowledge organization. Library Trends. 2002; 50 :330-349
• 27. McGrath WE. Explanation and prediction: Building a unified theory of librarianship, concept and review. Library Trends. 2002; 50 (3):350-370
• 28. Julien H, Duggan LJ. A longitudinal analysis of the information needs and uses literature. Library & Information Science Research. 2000; 22 (3):291-309. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/S0740‐8188(99)00057‐2
• 29. Pettigrew KE, McKechnie LEF. The use of theory in information science research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 2001; 52 (1):62-73. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/1532‐2890(2000)52:1<62::AID‐ASI1061>3.0.CO;2‐J
• 30. Kumasi KD, Charbonneau DH, Walster D. Theory talk in the library science scholarly literature: An exploratory analysis. Library & Information Science Research. 2013; 35 (3):175-180. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2013.02.004
• 31. Rawson C, Hughes‐Hassell S. Research by Design: The promise of design‐based research for school library research. School Libraries Worldwide. 2015; 21 (2):11-25
• 32. Hider P, Pymm B. Empirical research methods reported in high‐profile LIS journal literature. Library & Information Science Research. 2008; 30 (2):108-114. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2007.11.007
• 33. Bernhard, P. In search of research methods used in information science. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science. 1993;18(3): 1-35
• 34. Blake VLP. Since Shaughnessy. Collection Management. 1994; 19 (1‐2):1-42. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1300/J105v19n01_01
• 35. Schlachter GA. Abstracts of library science dissertations. Library Science Annual. 1989; 1 :1988-1996
• 36. Kim MT. Research record. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. 1996; 37 (4):376-383
• 37. Peritz BC. The methods of library science research: Some results from a bibliometric survey. Library Research. 1980; 2 (3):251-268
• 38. Nour MM. A quantitative analysis of the research articles published in core library journals of 1980. Library and Information Science Research. 1985; 7 (3):261-273
• 39. Enger KB, Quirk G, Stewart JA. Statistical methods used by authors of library and infor- mation science journal articles. Library and Information Science Research. 1989; 11 (1): 37-46
• 40. Jarvelin K, Vakkari P. The evolution of library and information science 1965-1985: A content analysis of journal articles. Information Processing and Management. 1993; 29 (1):129-144
• 41. Kumpulainen S. Library and information science research in 1975: Content analysis of the journal articles. Libri. 1991; 41 (1):59-76
• 42. Koufogiannakis D, Slater L, Crumley E. A content analysis of librarianship research. Journal of Information Science. 2004; 30 (3):227-239. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0165551504044668
• 43. Hildreth CR, Aytac S. Recent library practitioner research: A methodological analysis and critique on JSTOR. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. 2007; 48 (3):236-258
• 44. Gonzales‐Teruel A, Abad‐Garcia MF. Information needs and uses: An analysis of the literature published in Spain, 1990‐2004. Library and Information Science Research. 2007; 29 (1):30-46
• 45. Luo L, Mckinney M. JAL in the past decade: A comprehensive analysis of academic library research. The Journal of Academic Librarianship. 2015; 41 :123-129. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.01.003
• 46. Creswell JW. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; 2009
• 47. Strauss A, Corbin J. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications; 1990
• 48. Neuendorf KA. The Content Analysis Guidebook. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications; 2016
• 49. Dimitroff A. Research for special libraries: A quantitative analysis of the literature. Special Libraries. 1995; 86 (4):256-264
• 50. Cano V. Bibliometric overview of library and information science research in Spain. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 1999; 50 (8):675-680. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097‐4571(1999)50:8<675::AID‐ASI5>3.0.CO;2‐B
• 51. Powell RR. Recent trends in research: A methodological essay. Library & Information Science Research. 1999; 21 (1):91-119. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/S0740‐8188(99)80007‐3
• 52. Crawford GA. The research literature of academic librarianship: A comparison of college & Research Libraries and Journal of Academic Librarianship. College & Research Libraries. 1999; 60 (3):224-230. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5860/crl.60.3.224
• 53. Julien H, Pecoskie JJL, Reed K. Trends in information behavior research, 1999-2008: A content analysis. Library & Information Science Research. 2011; 33 (1):19-24. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2010.07.014
• 54. Fidel R. Qualitative methods in information retrieval research. Library and Information Science Research. 1993; 15 (3):219-247
• 55. Hernon P, Schwartz C. Reflections (editorial). Library and Information Science Research. 2003; 25 (1):1-2. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/S0740‐8188(02)00162‐7
• 56. Priestner A. Going native: Embracing ethnographic research methods in libraries. Revy. 2015; 38 (4):16-17
• 57. Blaikie N. Approaches to social enquiry. Cambridge: Polity; 1993
• 58. Johnson RB, Onwuegbuzie AJ. Mixed methods research: A research paradigm whose time has come. Educational Researcher. 2004; 33 (7):14-26
• 59. Westbrook L. Qualitative research methods: A review of major stages, data analysis techniques, and quality controls. Library & Information Science Research. 1994; 16 (3):241-254
• 60. Fidel R. Are we there yet?: Mixed methods research in library and information science. Library and Information Science Research. 2008; 30 (4):265-272. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2008.04.001

© 2017 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Continue reading from the same book

Edited by Sonyel Oflazoglu Dora

Published: 28 June 2017

By Seyma Demir and Yasemin Yildirim Usta

1871 downloads

By Maria Cecília de Souza Minayo

2115 downloads

By Yusuf Bilgin

3158 downloads

College & Research Libraries News  ( C&RL News ) is the official newsmagazine and publication of record of the Association of College & Research Libraries,  providing articles on the latest trends and practices affecting academic and research libraries.

C&RL News  became an online-only publication beginning with the January 2022 issue.

C&RL News  Reader Survey

Give us your feedback in the 2024  C&RL News   reader survey ! The survey asks a series of questions today to gather your thoughts on the contents and presentation of the magazine and should only take approximately 5-7 minutes to complete. Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback and suggestions for  C&RL News , we greatly appreciate and value your input.

ALA JobLIST

Advertising Information

• Preparing great speeches: A 10-step approach (212342 views)
• The American Civil War: A collection of free online primary sources (198395 views)
• 2018 top trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education (77594 views)

2021–22 ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee

Top trends in academic libraries

A review of the trends and issues

This article summarizes trending topics in academic librarianship from the past two years–a time of tremendous upheaval and change, including a global pandemic, difficult reflections concerning racial justice, and war between nation states. Rapid changes and uncertainty from these events have created a significant amount of shifts to academic libraries, higher education, and society in general. Such shifts have yielded new perspectives and innovations in how librarians approach delivering services, supporting student success, managing staff and physical spaces, embracing new technology, and managing data. This report attempts to provide a snapshot of developments worth noting.

COVID-related trends

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic library services has been significant, and these changes, in many cases, are ongoing. The issues identified below transcend the period covered by this review as libraries face a fundamental shift that will extend far into the future and beyond the pandemic. In early 2020, nearly all academic 1 and public 2 libraries closed temporarily and shifted towards virtual services. Despite in-person closures, libraries continued online services, 3 kept their communities informed, 4 and adopted innovative collaborations 5 and technologies to adapt to changing circumstances. These closures and the institutional changes that enabled them had a significant and diverse impact on librarianship, including rethinking long-held paradigms, 6 increased professional stress around institutional budgets, 7 and the ability to work remotely. 8 The pandemic also surfaced long-standing issues of inequality 9 and inaccessibility 10 in libraries. Despite the challenges raised by closures, libraries continued to deliver core services and creative solutions, including virtual reference with increasing complexity, 11 a renewed focus on digital literacy with the rise in online learning, 12 and born-digital collection development. 13

Library staffing challenges

Since early 2020, the pandemic and racial justice protests have drawn increased attention to several trends in library and higher education staffing. Inequities between librarians and other library staff were heightened. One study found many lower-income and lower-status staff were required to work in-person to a greater degree than librarians and administrators. 14 The contradiction between the necessity of these “frontline” and “essential” positions and their lower-rates of financial compensation has become difficult to ignore. Such staff, often quite ably, perform duties that had previously been the purview of credentialed librarians. 15 Additionally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics note that while workers of color represent 25% of the higher education workforce, more than half of individuals who lost jobs during COVID-19 have been nonwhite. 16 Lingering pandemic impacts, such as budget cuts and hiring freezes, have led to inadequate staffing, 17 even as services have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels. Of note is that, partly in response to university pandemic austerity measures, Northwestern University’s library workers announced their unionization with SEIU Local 73, which has been recognized by the university. 18, 19

Low morale continues to be an area of concern in librarianship, 20, 21 particularly for librarians of color, nonlibrarian staff, 22 and members of underrepresented groups. Stress from caretaking responsibilities for workers who lost childcare or other forms of support during the pandemic has exacerbated issues of esprit de corps and well-being in the workplace. For academic librarians, who are pre-tenure or otherwise expected to contribute publications and presentations to library scholarship (and already at a high-stress time in their careers), 23 the pandemic has created additional challenges to those with caretaking responsibilities, particularly women. 24, 25 These workers already experience burnout at higher rates. 26 Future research concerning recruitment and retention may also investigate the benefits and repercussions of library staff working remotely and wanting to continue doing so.

Space utilization

COVID has thrust the physical spaces of libraries, along with most campus facilities, into the forefront of faculty, staff, and student consciousness over the past two years. Balancing demands for the use of current spaces, increases to construction pricing that may extend projects into 2023, and aligning current capital budgets to this reality continue to impact decisions about how existing spaces will evolve in the near future.

Beyond maintaining appropriate distancing or providing adequate sanitization, librarians operating physical facilities are asking questions, including whether and how to operate in-person collaboration spaces safely (for both users and staff), how to provide resources consistently during waves of openings and closures, and how to assess and address patron and staff levels of comfort interacting in a physical space. Rapidly changing methods of service delivery, information access, and materials storage are continuing to generate questions that may possibly reshape the reliance on centralized, in-person settings as more options move online or become embedded externally. 27

Simultaneously, key trends in library design continue to be reassessed and may help inform librarians in the near future. For instance, one study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln argues that recent trends in library space have overcommitted to collaborative learning spaces at the cost of providing valued space for intensive academic work. 28 Daejin Kim, Sheila Bosch, and Jae Hwa Lee investigated, pre-COVID, how collaboration spaces are used and found that furniture or spaces intended for multiple people are frequently being used by single individuals. 29 Similar studies looking at more nuanced patron needs find that, much like evolving workplace trends, users want a wide variety of space types with different acoustical, privacy, and technology needs according to the work undertaken. 30 Recent studies in other academic settings point to taking this moment of change to pilot new layouts or space configurations that align better with current service needs and that are more activity-based rather than based on type of occupant or user. 31 A multiplicity of trends dominate discussions surrounding space. Accordingly, it is clear that local institutional factors ranging from budget to different use cases will continue to influence how space is allocated, constructed, and used.

Collaborative collections and growth of shared print

While there is a long history of libraries working together to preserve and provide access to rich collections, collaboration around shared print programs has rapidly accelerated in recent years. By creating a collaborative collection, which “elevates the concept of a library collection to scales above a single institution, extending its boundaries to encompass the resources concentrated among a group of libraries,” 32 these programs help research libraries to fulfill their mission to preserve the scholarly record in an era of changing usage, limited funding, and space constraints.

With an initial focus on print journals, shared print programs have matured and evolved to include print monographs more recently. According to Susan Stearns and Alison Wohlers, 33 “over 300 academic and research libraries in the U.S. and Canada participate in some form of shared print program, committing to archive or retain tens of millions of monographs and hundreds of thousands of serial and journal print titles.” A major factor in the growth of shared print monograph initiatives was the launch of the HathiTrust Shared Print Program, which “has now secured commitments on more than 5.4 million individual titles held in the HathiTrust Digital Library.” 34

However, as these programs have grown, so has the need for more coordination, standards, and infrastructure. Several groups have been launched in recent years to tackle these issues. In 2015, the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance was founded to coordinate among regional shared print journal programs in order to archive more titles and ensure sufficient copies are preserved. 35 As a complementary organization, the Partnership for Shared Book Collections was founded in 2019 to collaborate around shared print monographs, aiming to “reduce the cost of retaining the scholarly record” and “develop and promote evidence-based best practices.” 36 Recently the California Digital Library, the Center for Research Libraries, and HathiTrust announced a collaboration around shared print infrastructure intended to develop standards, workflows, and tools to support collaborative efforts and embed shared print work into the lifecycle of collection development and management. 37 In addition, groups such as the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the University of California Libraries, and the Canadian Collective Print Strategy Working Group have embarked on their own initiatives to take more strategic and intentional approaches to collection development and management in light of their shared print collaborations. 38

Finally, it is worth noting that controlled digital lending (CDL) is an emerging trend where libraries “circulate temporary digital copies of print books they own in a one-to-one ratio of ‘loaned to owned,’ removing the print copy from circulation while the digital copy is in use.” 39 ACRL has signed a statement in support of CDL. 40 CDL advocates argue that reasonable interpretation of copyright law should insulate libraries from legal exposure; however, the legality of CDL remains an open question. 41

Open everything

The open access (OA) movement to “make scholarly works both freely available and reusable” continues to be important for librarians, educators, and administrators in higher education. 42 Yet, as Ángel Borrego, Lluís Anglada, and Ernest Abadal, state, the “landscape of scholarly communication is characterized by increasing costs and limited access to research output.” 43 Numerous barriers exist ranging from economics to policy that prevent wide-scale adoption in higher education of executing scholarly communication strategies that would be considered open access. Issues with increasing subscription costs for academic journals are well documented. 44 While librarians typically report favorable beliefs about OA there is a noted lack of OA policy. 45 A report from Hannah Rosen and Jill Grogg, states “while both formal and informal policies exist. . .” regarding OA scholarship, data, and open educational resources, most institutions do not have policies in place “resulting in a scatter-shot approach to open content of all types and less than cohesive institutional strategies.” 46

In addition to further opportunities regarding OA training and outreach, librarians also have opportunities to help with the “identification of, and sometimes deposit into the institutional repository of works that are sitting outside the peer reviewed literature,” often called gray literature. 47 Barriers continue to exist for accessing and using open access information. Some scholars are concerned that open access materials are not understandable to the general public, defeating the point of making such materials open and accessible in the first place. 48 For such reasons there is an increasing call for articles to use a “significance statement,” which describes an article concisely in plain language understandable to a lay audience. 49

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for various types of OA content to become more widely available and served as “proof of concept” for what is possible. 50 For instance, OA resources were viewed as important for providing off-campus access to library materials in some developing countries. 51 Some publishers recognized the public health importance of providing timely information related to COVID-19 and committed to open access publication of articles relating to it. 52 Worthy of note were the use of preprint servers by scientists, which “in effect [were] crowdsourcing rapid expert peer-review.” 53 Europe developed an open access publishing initiative—Plan S—in 2018 with support from national research agencies and 12 European countries. As of 2020, notable journals like Nature announced they would facilitate Plan S committing to publishing with full open access in the future. 54

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) tracks “Big Deal” cancellations, which continue to occur. For instance, Purdue University canceled a $3.3 million contract for 2020 opting instead for a one-year, title-by-title contract for 2021, while New Mexico State University pointed out both inflationary journal prices and COVID-19 considerations while cutting their collections budget by $800,000 for fiscal year 2021. 55 Some universities and consortia are seeking “transformative agreements,” which promote open access publishing by their authors and allow those authors to maintain copyright. Transformative agreements facilitate a more transparent journal licensing process and aim to shift the focus of “scholarly journal licensing from cost containment towards open access publication.” 56

Many facets of the OA movement continue to develop. As libraries continue more aggressive journal subscription negotiations, which may include transformative agreements, as well as possible Big Deal cancellations, 57 more questions will develop about the future of access to scholarly materials. This is multivariable including open data, open educational resources, and OA policies, tools, and advocacy. Combined with the results of unanticipated experiments born from COVID-19, OA continues to be a focal point for academic librarians and administrators.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly embedded in academic libraries tools and services. Pattern recognition, 58 AI-powered text recognition, transcription, and searching of historical documents 59 are prime examples that facilitate search and discovery. Keenious, cofunded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Union, is a research tool for document and writing analysis, attempting to make online research easier. 60 Cactus Communications (CACTUS) recently announced a new AI-powered tool, Paperpal Preflight, “to improve the scholarly publishing experience for researchers, peer reviewers, and journal editors” during the manuscript submission process. 61

The adoption of AI in virtual reference services provides a new online model for libraries by using “chatbots.” 62 Recent attempts to automate standard library operations, such as cataloging, through expert systems have focused on simpler tasks like descriptive cataloging. 63 A team of researchers from the National Library of Norway describes an experiment that uses AI methods to automatically group articles and assign Dewey Decimal numbers to aid in cataloging. 64

The Library of Congress is experimenting with neural networks and the use of computer vision. The intent is to create new online search prototypes that can sort through large amounts of data in new ways, such as examining and contextualizing millions of digitized items that humans could not do alone. 65 Other experimental work like the Newspaper Navigator aims to explore the visual and textual content via AI. 66 At Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab, data-mining techniques are used to illuminate the conventions of portraiture and other visual genres in the 19th century. 67 Leaders, such as Eun Seo Jo and Timnit Gebru, have drawn archives as a model for data collection and annotation in order to inform how decisions that surround fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics are addressed in machine learning systems. 68

In the Netherlands, concerns that surround data, information ethics, and data-driven public management have been captured under the Data Ethics Decision Aid (DEDA) to use a deliberative rather than rule-based approach to ethical concerns and advance the development of responsible data practices. 69 It is also important to acknowledge cybersecurity concerns as AI becomes more and more embedded in systems routinely used in libraries. 70

While AI technologies could be harnessed to provide more tailored search results, monitor social distancing, and integrate the library into personal assistants, 71 it can also help academic libraries demonstrate real value to institutions if it is used judiciously. Asaf Tzachor et al. expressed concerns stemming from urgency in adopting these technologies along with the challenging ethical issues and risks that can arise in a crisis—the COVID-19 pandemic prevention and response is one example. 72 At the same time, AI’s potential has remained largely untapped among research libraries. A recent Ex Libris survey revealed that while nearly 80 percent of research librarians are exploring the use of AI and machine learning, only about 5 percent are currently leveraging the technology. 73

Higher education faces increased challenges with the surging interest in big data. The need to invest in training skilled employees, increase repository capacity, and assign and clarify responsibilities 74 remains critical as libraries and librarians continue to take on leadership roles 75 and provide data services. Those vanguard libraries that were the first to offer services have begun to evaluate programs, 76 services, 77 and tools 78 and make adjustments focusing both on usability for the owner of the data to upload and share data sets and discoverability of those data sets for the end user. The body of literature associated with research data management services in libraries and skill development has reached the point where literature reviews and scoping reviews are looking back in time to draw conclusions and offer suggestions to advance the field and the libraries’ role. 79

Data mining proves itself as an emerging field as well, especially when linked to the Internet of Things (IoT). A recent study using both Clarivate Analytics Web of Science and Sciverse Scopus revealed that knowledge discovery in databases are paving the way to make data increasingly more meaningful. 80 Along these same lines, data analytic methods are constantly changing with the ever-increasing volume of data generated. As a result, “cloud-based AI activities are expected to increase five-fold by 2023,” 81 which could translate into a greater capacity “to store data in a cost-effective manner and glean more actionable insight from IoT data.” 82

Data curation remains an overarching role for the library. 83 The term active curation, involvement of the curator from collection and development of the data set to its final analysis and storage, 84 will continue to expand as librarians become more embedded in the data life cycle. Additionally, institutions of higher education continue to show a growing interest in data science education. Based on the study conducted at Purdue University in 2017 to examine the roles of academic libraries to support data science education curriculum, results showed that “hard-core” scientific courses for third- and fourth-year STEM students were most common as opposed to offerings in data-oriented skills, such as data management, data ethics, and data communications. 85 At schools of information, a group of instructors who teach data curation have expressed the importance of integrating both research and teaching in the curriculum. The objective would give students opportunities to develop core competencies, learn about data librarianship and practices to support preservation and access, and broaden their professional horizons by gaining a greater awareness with multidimensional problems of working with data. 86

Finally, in light of the growing prominence of data, data visualization skills continue to be highly valued, and visual results can be interpreted as a research product and form of expression. Libraries are taking a greater interest in data visualization as they seek to tell their own story, including assessment, value of the library, collection analysis, and internal capacity building. 87

Critical librarianship

Critical librarianship continues to be an important theoretical perspective for information professionals. Rooted in critical theory (originally denoting a group of Marxist philosophers but over time scholars in many fields now employ critical theory or critical approaches), critical librarianship challenges traditional concepts in librarianship. 88 For instance, critical librarianship argues that libraries are not neutral and challenges librarians to take active steps toward antiracist and antioppresive practices both for the benefit of users but also for the benefit of the profession itself. 89 As libraries continue to aim for accessibility and more welcoming spaces, scholars familiar with critical librarianship, urge library workers to take meaningful action to include its teachings in their daily practice–referred to as praxis. 90 With little diversity in the library professions, 91 and many critiques of popular approaches to information literacy, for instance the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education’s lack of acknowledgement of the underlying power structures in which academia operates, 92 critical librarianship argues that there are numerous opportunities for librarians to fight inequity, racism, sexism, and other problems through concrete action.

One facet of critical librarianship and critical pedagogy is critical information literacy (CIL). CIL literature discusses why and how information professionals should ask questions about power dynamics within academia, equal access to information, and the economic incentives around how information and data are created, stored, and used. CIL scholarship also critiques academia itself. As with other teaching and learning theories, CIL is constantly evolving and must be adapted for students in different course levels and in different course subjects. 93 Margaret Rose Torrell examined implementing CIL when using a writing across the curriculum approach with undergraduates, and highlighted the benefits of having more than a one-shot session with students. 94 Marcia Rapchak employed CIL with graduate students who were “eager to engage in discussion and material,” such as case studies, essays, and self assessments. 95 L Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight taught LIS students and found that including and centering intersectionalities such as race and gender in their pedagogical approach allowed them to be better teachers. 96 Erin Fields and Adair Harper incorporated CIL and open pedagogy into a university course and found that by using nonacademic sources and student work, their students were more empowered to work within and assess the current information landscape. 97

Critical approaches to librarianship and information literacy will likely continue to be an area of exploration for LIS scholars.

We foresee numerous challenges in the next few years, including potential budget reductions as well as questions about returning to the physical office after an extended period of virtual work. We are also excited that new opportunities for collaboration, additional interest in critical perspectives, and incorporation of different approaches to manage shared collections will allow academic librarians to continue leading the way in student success and learning, organizational impact, and rigorous scholarly inquiry.

• Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, “Academic Library Response to COVID19,” Ithaka S+R, March 13, 2020, https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/academic-library-response-to-covid19/ .
• Ting Wang and Brady Lund, “Announcement Information Provided by United States’ Public Libraries during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic,” Public Library Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2020): 283–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1764325 .
• Marie L. Radford, Laura Costello, and Kaitlin Montague, “Surging Virtual Reference Services: COVID-19 a Game Changer,” College & Research Libraries News 82, no. 3 (2021), https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.82.3.106 .
• Bibi M. Alajmi and Dalal Albudaiwi, “Response to COVID-19 Pandemic: Where Do Public Libraries Stand?” P ublic Library Quarterly 40, no. 6 (2021): 540–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1827618 .
• Liladhar R. Pendse, “Academic Libraries and Research in Flux: Global Conversations in Times of COVID-19,” College & Research Libraries News 82, no. 1 (2021): 36, https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.82.1.36 .
• Sara Jones, “Optimizing Public Library Resources in a Post COVID-19 World,” Journal of Library Administration 60, no. 8 (2020): 951–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2020.1820281 .
• Lily Todorinova, “One Year In: A Survey of Public Services Librarians on the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Journal of Library Administration 61, no. 7 (October 3, 2021): 776–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2021.1972728 .
• Anna R. Craft, “Remote Work in Library Technical Services: Connecting Historical Perspectives to Realities of the Developing COVID-19 Pandemic,” Serials Review 46, no. 3 (2020): 227–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2020.1806658 .
• Amelia N. Gibson et al., “Struggling to Breathe: COVID-19, Protest and the LIS Response,” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion an International Journal 40, no. 1 (2020): 74–82, https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-07-2020-0178 .
• J. J. Pionke, “COVID-19, Accessibility, and Libraries: A Call to Action,” College & Research Libraries News 81, no. 8 (2020): 398, https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.81.8.398 .
• Raeda Anderson, Katherine Fisher, and Jeremy Walker, “Library Consultations and a Global Pandemic: An Analysis of Consultation Difficulty during COVID-19 across Multiple Factors,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 47, no. 1 (2021): 102273, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102273 .
• Konstantina Martzoukou, “Academic Libraries in COVID-19: A Renewed Mission for Digital Literacy,” Library Management, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-09-2020-0131 .
• Anna L. Neatrour, Jeremy Myntti, and Rachel J Wittmann, “Documenting Contemporary Regional History: The Utah COVID-19 Digital Collection,” Digital Library Perspectives ahead-of-print, no. ahead-of-print (2020), https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-04-2020-0025 .
• Lindsey Wharton and Emily Zoe Mann, “Transitioning Online Reference Staffing Models: Assessing and Balancing Needs of Patrons and Practitioners,” T he Reference Librarian 61, no. 1 (2020): 15–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.2019.1678217 .
• Kevin R. McClure, “Higher Ed, We’ve Got a Morale Problem—And a Free T-Shirt Won’t Fix It—EdSurge News,” EdSurge, September 27, 2021, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-09-27-higher-ed-we-ve-got-a-morale-problem-and-a-free-t-shirt-won-t-fix-it .
• Isabel Funk, “Northwestern University Library Workers Union Seeks Recognition,” The Daily Northwestern (blog), October 15, 2021, https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/10/15/campus/northwestern-university-library-workers-union-seeks-formal-recognition/ .
• Colleen Flaherty, “When Librarians Unionize,” Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2022, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/01/12/northwestern-librarians-unionize-following-furloughs-cuts .
• Christina Heady et al., “Contributory Factors to Academic Librarian Turnover: A Mixed-Methods Study,” Journal of Library Administration 60, no. 6 (August 17, 2020): 579–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2020.1748425 .
• Ann Glusker, Celia Emmelhainz, Natalia Estrada, and Bonita Dyess, “Viewed as Equals”: The Impacts of Library Organizational Cultures and Management on Library Staff Morale,” Journal of Library Administration 62, no. 2 (2022): 153-189, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2022.2026119 .
• Ann Glusker et al., “‘Viewed as Equals’: The Impacts of Library Organizational Cultures and Management on Library Staff Morale,” Journal of Library Administration 62, no. 2 (February 17, 2022): 153–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2022.2026119 .
• Laura Cameron, Stephanie Pierce, and Julia Conroy, “Occupational Stress Measures of Tenure-Track Librarians,” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 53, no. 4 (2021): 551–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000620967736 .
• Alessandra Minello, “The Pandemic and the Female Academic,” Nature, April 17, 2020, 1135–39, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01135-9 .
• Vicki L. Baker, “Women in Higher Education: Re-Imagining Leadership in the Academy in Times of Crisis,” The Journal of Faculty Development 35, no. 1 (2021): 57–62.
• Jason Martin, “Job Satisfaction of Professional Librarians and Library Staff,” Journal of Library Administration 60, no. 4 (May 2020): 365–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2020.1721941 .
• Lindsay Blake, Darra Ballance, Kathy Davies, Julie K. Gaines, Kim Mears, Peter Shipman, Maryska Connolly-Brown, and Vicki Burchfield, “Patron Perception and Utilization of an Embedded Librarian Program,” Journal of the Medical Library Association 104, no. 3 (2016): 226-230, https://doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.104.3.008 .
• Erica Lynn DeFrain, Jennifer Thoegersen, and Miyoung Hong, “Standing Out or Blending In: Academic Libraries in the Crowded Informal Learning Space Ecosystem,” College & Research Libraries 83, no. 1 (January 3, 2022): 45, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.1.4 5.
• Daejin Kim, Sheila Bosch, and Jae Hwa Lee, “Alone with Others: Understanding Physical Environmental Needs of Students within an Academic Library Setting,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 46, no. 2 (2020): 102098, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.102098 .
• Camille Andrews, Sara E. Wright, and Howard Raskin, “Library Learning Spaces: Investigating Libraries and Investing in Student Feedback,” Journal of Library Administration 56, no. 6 (2016): 647-672, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2015.1105556 .
• Lisa Wesel, “Unassigned Space at Colleges and Universities,” Tradeline, Inc. (2021), accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.tradelineinc.com/reports/2021-8/unassigned-space-colleges-and-universities .
• Brian Lavoie, Lorcan Dempsey, and Constance Malpas, “Reflections on Collective Collections,” College & Research Libraries 81, no. 6 (2020): 981–96, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.81.6.981 .
• Susan Stearns and Alison Wohlers, “Shared Print on the Threshold: Looking Back and Forging the Future,” Collaborative Librarianship 12, no. 2 (2020): 159, https://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol12/iss2/5/ .
• Heather Weltin and Natalie Fulkerson, “Old Texts, New Networks: HathiTrust and the Future of Shared Print,” in Transforming Print: Collection Development and Management for Our Connected Future (ALA Editions, 2021), 65–79, http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/169166 .
• Susan Stearns and Alison Wohlers, “Shared Print on the Threshold: Looking Back and Forging the Future,” Collaborative Librarianship 12, no. 2 (2020): 159–69, https://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol12/iss2/5/ .
• Lisa Peet, “Big Ten Academic Alliance Plans BIG Collection,” Library Journal, March 2021, https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=big-ten-academic-alliance-plans-big-collection-across-15-libraries ; Canadian Collective Print Strategy Working Group, “Final Report of the Canadian Collective Print Strategy Working Group,” Canadian Association of Research Libraries, September 2020, https://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/CCPSWG_final_report_EN.pdf .
• Association of Research Libraries, “Association of Research Libraries Signs Statement in Support of Controlled Digital Lending,” accessed March 31, 2022, https://www.arl.org/news/association-of-research-libraries-signs-statement-in-support-of-controlled-digital-lending/ .
• Chad Currier and Alissa Centivany, “Controlled Digital Lending” Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 1 (2021): 80–91, https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.438 .
• Open Access (n.d.), Electronic Frontier Foundation, retrieved January 30, 2022, http://eff.org/issues/open-access .
• Ángel Borrego, Lluís Anglada, and Ernest Abadal, “Transformative Agreements: Do They Pave the Way to Open Access?” Learned Publishing 34, no. 2 (2021): 216–32, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1347 .
• Christine Fruin, LibGuides: Scholarly Communication Toolkit: Economics of Publishing, Acrl.libguides.com (n.d.), https://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/economics .
• Rachel Elizabeth Scott, Caitlin Harrington, and Ana Dubnjakovic, “Exploring Open Access Practices, Attitudes, and Policies in Academic Libraries,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 21, no. 2 (2021): 365–88, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2021.0020 .
• Hannah Rosen and Jill Grogg, “LYRASIS 2020 Open Content Survey Report,” (June 2020): 1-53, www.lyrasis.org/programs/Pages/open-content-survey-report.aspx .
• Danny Kingsley, “The ‘Impact Opportunity’ for Academic Libraries through Grey Literature,” The Serials Librarian 79, no. 3–4 (November 16, 2020): 281–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2020.1847744 .
• May R. Berenbaum, “On COVID-19, Cognitive Bias, and Open Access,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 2 (January 12, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026319118 .
• Willa Tavernier, “COVID-19 Demonstrates the Value of Open Access: What Happens Next?,” College & Research Libraries News 81, no. 5 (May 2020), https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.81.5.226 .
• Muhammad Rafiq, Syeda Hina Batool, Amna Farzand Ali, and Midrar Ullah, “University Libraries Response to COVID-19 Pandemic: A Developing Country Perspective,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 47, no. 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102280 .
• Tavernier, “COVID-19 Demonstrates.”
• Holly Else, “Nature Journals Reveal Terms of Landmark Open-Access Option,” Nature 588 (November 2020): 19–20, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03324-y .
• “Big Deal Cancellations,” accessed February 4, 2022, https://bigdeal.sparcopen.org/cancellations .
• Borrego et al., “Transformative agreements.”
• “Project Launch: Canceling the Big Deal,” Ithaka S+R, May 2020, https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/project-launch-canceling-the-big-deal/ .
• Garima Gujral, “Perceptions and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence Technologies for Academic Libraries: An Overview of Global Trends,” in 12th International CALIBER-2019, n.d., https://ir.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/1944/2337 .
• “Transkribus,” READ coop,accessed December 15, 2021, https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/9 .
• “Keenious,” accessed December 15, 2021, https://keenious.com/ .
• Society for Scholarly Publishing, “New AI-Powered Tool Improves Screening for Journals and Authors,” Member news and release (December 2, 2021), https://www.sspnet.org/community/news/new-ai-powered-tool-improves-manuscript-screening-for-journals-and-authors/ .
• Souvick Ghosh, “Future of AI in Libraries,” SJSU, Center for Information Research and Innovation, March 15, 2021, https://ischool.sjsu.edu/ciri-blog/future-ai-libraries .
• S. Vijay Kumar, K. N. Sheshadri, “Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Academic Libraries,” International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering 7 (16) (2019): 136-140, https://doi.org/10.26438/ijcse/v7si16.136140 .
• Ryan Cordell, “Machine Learning and Libraries: A Report on the State of the Field,” Library of Congress (2020): https://apo.org.au/node/307049 .
• Sara Castellanos, “Library of Congress Looks to AI to Help Users Sift Through Its Collection,” June 24, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/library-of-congress-looks-to-ai-to-help-users-sift-through-its-collection-11624552197 .
• Library of Congress, “LABS,” Library of Congress, https://labs.loc.gov/work/experiments/newpaper-navigator (n.d.).
• “Neural Neighbors,” accessed December 14, 2021, https://dhlab.yale.edu/neural-neighbors/ .
• Eun Seo Jo and Timnit Gebru, “Lessons from Archives: Strategies for Collecting Sociocultural Data in Machine Learning,” In FAT* ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2020): 306–16, https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372829 .
• Aline Shakti Franzke, Iris Muis, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer, “Data Ethics Decision Aid (DEDA): A Dialogical Framework for Ethical Inquiry of AI and Data Projects in the Netherlands,” Ethics and Information Technology 23 (2021): 551–67, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09577-5 .
• Clayton Davis, “Does a Lack of AI Security Mean More Cyberattacks Are Coming?” November 1, 2021, https://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Does-a-Lack-of-AI-Security-Mean-More-Cyberattacks-are-Coming-149731.aspx .
• C. C. Cox, “Changed, Changed Utterly,” Inside Higher Ed, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/06/05/academic-libraries-will-change-significant-ways-result-pandemic-opinion .
• Asaf Tzachor et al., “Artificial Intelligence in a Crisis Needs Ethics with Urgency,” Nature Machine Intelligence 2 (2020): 365–66, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0195-0 .
• Ellen Prokop et al., “AI and the Digitized Photoarchive,” Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 40, no. 1 (2021): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1086/714604 .
• Bradley Wade Bishop et al., “Potential Roles for Science Librarians in Research Data Management: A Gap Analysis,” Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, no. 98 (Summer 2021): 21–37, https://doi.org/10.29173/istl2602 .
• Jeonghyun Kim, “Determining Research Data Services Maturity: The Role of Library Leadership and Stakeholder Involvement,” Library & Information Science Research 43, no. 2 (2021): 101092, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2021.101092 ; Cas Laskowski, “Structuring Better Services for Unstructured Data: Academic Libraries Are Key to an Ethical Research Data Future with Big Data,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 47, no. 4 (2021): 102335, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102335 .
• Fred Willie Zametkin LaPolla, Nicole Contaxis, and Alisa Surkis, “Piloting a Long-Term Evaluation of Library Data Workshops,” Journal of the Medical Library Association 109, no. 3 (October 5, 2021), https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2021.1047 .
• Jeonghyun Kim, “Determining Research Data Services Maturity: The Role of Library Leadership and Stakeholder Involvement,” Library & Information Science Research 43, no. 2 (2021): 101092, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2021.101092 .
• Sagar Bhimrao Gajbe et al., “Evaluation and Analysis of Data Management Plan Tools: A Parametric Approach,” Information Processing & Management 58, no. 3 (2021): 102480, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2020.102480 ; Sara Mannheimer et al., “Dataset Search: A Lightweight, Community-Built Tool to Support Research Data Discovery,” Journal of EScience Librarianship 10, no. 1 (January 19, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1189 ; Kasey Soska et al., “(Hyper)Active Data Curation: A Video Case Study from Behavioral Science,” Journal of EScience Librarianship 10, no. 3 (August 11, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1208 .
• Angeliki Andrikopoulou, Jennifer Rowley, and Geoff Walton, “Research Data Management (RDM) and the Evolving Identity of Academic Libraries and Librarians: A Literature Review,” New Review of Academic Librarianship, 2021, 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2021.1964549 ; Nedelina Tchangalova et al., “Research Support Services in STEM Libraries: A Scoping Review,” Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no. 97 (May 7, 2021), https://doi.org/10.29173/istl2574 .
• Sumeer Gul and Shohar Bano, “Exploring Data Mining: Facets and Emerging Trends,” Digital Library Perspectives, 2021, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/DLP-08-2020-0078 .
• Raghavendra Singh, “Top Data and Analytics Trends for 2021,” Data Science Central, n.d., https://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/top-data-and-analytics-trends-for-2021 .
• Seth Erickson, “Plain Text and Character Encoding: A Primer for Data Curators,” Journal of Escience Librarianship 10, no. 3 (August 11, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1211 ; F. Rios and C. Ly, “Implementing and Managing a Data Curation Workflow in the Cloud,” Journal of EScience Librarianship 10, no. 3 (2021): e1205, https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1205 ; Kasey Soska et al., “(Hyper)Active Data Curation: A Video Case Study from Behavioral Science,” Journal of eScience Librarianship 10, no. 3 (August 11, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1208 .
• Inna Kouper et al., “Active Curation of Large Longitudinal Surveys: A Case Study,” Journal of EScience Librarianship 10, no. 3 (August 11, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1210 .
• Gang Shao et al., “Exploring Potential Roles of Academic Libraries in Undergraduate Data Science Education Curriculum Development,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 47, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102320 .
• Amelia Acker, Devan Ray Donaldson, Adam Kriesburg, Andrea Thomer, and Nicholas Weber, “Integrating Research and Teaching for Data Curation in ISchools,” In Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 57, (October 2020), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.285 .
• Negeen Aghassibake, Justin Joque, and Matthew L. Sisk, “Supporting Data Visualization Services in Academic Libraries,” The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, 2020, https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/supporting-data-visualization-services-in-academic-libraries/ .
• James BohmanJeffrey Flynn, and Robin Celikates, “Critical Theory,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2021, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/critical-theory/ .
• Marcia Rapchak, “Introducing Critical Librarianship to Information Professionals: Using Critical Pedagogy and Critical Information Literacy in an LIS Graduate Course,” Communications in Information Literacy 15, no. 1 (June 21, 2021), https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2021.15.1.8 ; Suzanne M. Stauffer, “Educating for Whiteness: Applying Critical Race Theory’s Revisionist History in Library and Information Science Research: A Methodology Paper,” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 61 no. 4 (October 2020): 452–62, https://doi.org/10.3138/jelis.61.4.2019-0042 .
• Marcia Rapchak, “Introducing Critical Librarianship to Information Professionals: Using Critical Pedagogy and Critical Information Literacy in an LIS Course,” Communications in Information Literacy 15, no. 1 (2021): 140-157, https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2021.15.1.8 .
• Amy VanScoy and Kawanna Bright, “Articulating the Experience of Uniqueness and Difference for Librarians of Color,” The Library Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2019): 285-297, https://doi.org/10.1086/704962 .
• Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, “Dreaming Revolutionary Futures: Critical Race’s Centrality to Ending White Supremacy,” Communications in Information Literacy 14, no. 1 (2020): 12-26, http://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.1.2 .
• Margaret Rose Torrell, “That Was Then, This Is Wow: A Case for Critical Information Literacy Across the Curriculum,” Communications in Information Literacy 14, no. 1 (2020): 118-133, http://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.1.9 .
• Torrell, 119.
• Rapchak, 146.
• Leung and López-McKnight, 17.
• Erin Fields and Adair Harper, “Opening Up Information Literacy: Empowering Students Through Open Pedagogy,” Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Innovative Pedagogy 2, no. 1 (2020): 4-15, https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/sotl_ip/vol2/iss1/ 1.

Article Views (Last 12 Months)

Contact ACRL for article usage statistics from 2010-April 2017.

Article Views (By Year/Month)

© 2024 Association of College and Research Libraries , a division of the American Library Association

Print ISSN: 0099-0086 | Online ISSN: 2150-6698

ALA Privacy Policy

ISSN: 2150-6698

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

•  We're Hiring!
•  Help Center

Library Science

• Most Cited Papers
• Most Downloaded Papers
• Newest Papers
• Save to Library
• Last »
• Academic Librarianship Follow Following
• Digital Libraries Follow Following
• Information Literacy Follow Following
• Library and Information Science Follow Following
• Academic Libraries Follow Following
• Information Science Follow Following
• Library 2.0 Follow Following
• Scholarly Communication Follow Following
• Library Faculty Research Follow Following
• Open Access Follow Following

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• Academia.edu Publishing
•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

ALA User Menu

• ALA Websites

Breadcrumb navigation

• Contact Congress

ALA Research & Library Topics

• Share This Page
• About the ALA Library
• Books and Reading FAQ
• Resource Guides
• Topics A to Z

Due to snow and inclement weather, all CCNY Libraries will be closed Tuesday February 13, 2024. Click here to get real-time help from a librarian.

Research toolkit.

• Getting Started

Topics & Search Strategies

• Types of Sources
• Finding Books
• Finding Articles
• Finding Primary Sources
• Requesting Material from Other Libraries
• Evaluating Information
• Reading Scholarly Articles
• Citing Sources
• Off-Campus Access

The tabs below cover topics useful for getting started with research: choosing a topic, narrowing that topic, identifying key words to use in a database search, and more.

Choosing a Topic

• Narrowing a Topic

Identifying Key Words

Search strategies, boolean operators.

This section will help you consider a topic for your research paper that is interesting to you, and that is researchable using library resources. When you select a topic and focused research question, you’ll want to consider a few things:

• Does your assignment specify an area you'll need to write about? If not, does your class have a theme? Does your professor want your research topic to correspond to that theme?
• What do YOU find interesting? You are going to spend hours reading information, thinking about how the information fits together, and then writing pages of critical analysis about your topic. This will be a more pleasant experience for you if you are genuinely interested in the topic you choose.
• Keep in mind that when you are searching for information about your topic, you can only find information that has been published. This means you’re looking for a topic that other people are talking about, thinking about, and writing about. So, it needs to be interesting to you, but also to others.
• Don’t forget that you already know things! Many research papers start from the spark of an idea from something we hear or witness in the world around us.

Remember, your research question is NOT your thesis statement; it’s exploratory. If you start doing research and discover that people are writing articles about a more interesting (or easier to research) question, you can always adjust your question as you collect information.

Ideally you will find a topic that genuinely interests you, and develop a clear, concise, and researchable question based on that topic.

Narrowing Your Topic

Sometimes, we start with a topic in mind that is too broad or general. It might seem like the right size for your paper in the beginning, but is way too big after you’ve learned a little more about it. When this happens, you need to narrow the focus of your paper. You can do this by considering different ways to restrict your paper topic.

There are many ways to narrow the focus of your paper. Here are just a few:

• Who – population or group (e.g., college students; women; Asian Americans)
• What – discipline or focus (e.g., sociological or historical perspective)
• Where – geographic location (e.g., United States; universities; small towns)
• When – time period or era (19th century; Renaissance; Vietnam War)
• Why – why is the topic important? (to the class, to the field, or to you)

For example, a paper about alcohol use would be very broad. But a paper about reasons for alcohol abuse by women college students in the United States during the 1990s might be just right.

Further reading on narrowing a topic can be found in the section Narrowing A Topic from this ebook,  Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research , from Ohio State University.

Key words are the search terms you use to find materials in databases, search engines, OneSearch or elsewhere. Key words work by matching the words you entered with words that appear either:

• in the text of the articles you find
• in the materials used to describe the materials you're searching.

If you aren't sure what search words to use, think about what words other people might use to describe your topic!

Some things to consider:

• "Vampire" is a better search term than "monster" because it is more specific; you will often get more useful results with a more specific search.
• Intangible concepts can OFTEN be good search terms, but only if they are frequently used in a specific context:
• "Colonialism" is a good search term. "Cruelty" is not.
• "Law enforcement" and "police brutality" will return a very different list of results.

Here is a worksheet you can download and use to brainstorm ideas and key words on your topic.

• Narrowing your Research Question Worksheet for students to use in narrowing their research question and brainstorming search terms. Created by Sarah Cohn.

Revising Your Search

When you search, take a look at your search results! You can pull words that come up in your results to search again, or try different combinations of words from your brainstormed list. It might take a few searches to find the search results you want. Don't give up too quickly!

Start by doing a simple search on your topic in a database. See what kinds of results come back. Are the relevant? Are they what you were expecting to find? If they are relevant, great! If not, why not? Are your search terms too broad? Too narrow? Is there a better way to describe your topic? Try searching using different search terms. Or, explore your results using database filters. Here are some specific search strategies.

• Octavia Butler AND realism
• science fiction AND black women AND young adult literature
• science fiction OR afrofuturism AND young adult literature

• You can build the above searches in a single search box or use one box per search term. This can help you easily change out a single term to narrow or broaden your results.
• "Octavia Butler"
• science fiction"
• "young adult literature"
• You can also use key words or search terms you find in the subject terms or subject headings the database uses. This is sort of like talking to the database in it’s own language and how it tags or groups articles on similar topics. Often, this will increase the amount of relevant and specific results.

Boolean Operators are words that connect search terms or key words together to broaden or narrow the results retrieved. In library research they are often used with the library's research databases or the library catalog.

The three Boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT.

• AND narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain both words connected with AND.
• OR expands your search results by including results that contain one word, the other word, or both words.
• NOT narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain the word you designate before NOT, but not the word after NOT.

One way to visualize Boolean Operators is to use a Venn diagram. In a database, your Boolean searches would look like this

• Peanut butter AND jelly
• Peanut butter OR jelly
• Peanut butter NOT jelly

• << Previous: Getting Started
• Next: Types of Sources >>
• Last Updated: Jan 26, 2024 4:33 PM
• URL: https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/researchtoolkit

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 great research paper topics.

General Education

One of the hardest parts of writing a research paper can be just finding a good topic to write about. Fortunately we've done the hard work for you and have compiled a list of 113 interesting research paper topics. They've been organized into ten categories and cover a wide range of subjects so you can easily find the best topic for you.

In addition to the list of good research topics, we've included advice on what makes a good research paper topic and how you can use your topic to start writing a great paper.

What Makes a Good Research Paper Topic?

Not all research paper topics are created equal, and you want to make sure you choose a great topic before you start writing. Below are the three most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the best research paper topics.

#1: It's Something You're Interested In

A paper is always easier to write if you're interested in the topic, and you'll be more motivated to do in-depth research and write a paper that really covers the entire subject. Even if a certain research paper topic is getting a lot of buzz right now or other people seem interested in writing about it, don't feel tempted to make it your topic unless you genuinely have some sort of interest in it as well.

#2: There's Enough Information to Write a Paper

Even if you come up with the absolute best research paper topic and you're so excited to write about it, you won't be able to produce a good paper if there isn't enough research about the topic. This can happen for very specific or specialized topics, as well as topics that are too new to have enough research done on them at the moment. Easy research paper topics will always be topics with enough information to write a full-length paper.

Trying to write a research paper on a topic that doesn't have much research on it is incredibly hard, so before you decide on a topic, do a bit of preliminary searching and make sure you'll have all the information you need to write your paper.

#3: It Fits Your Teacher's Guidelines

Don't get so carried away looking at lists of research paper topics that you forget any requirements or restrictions your teacher may have put on research topic ideas. If you're writing a research paper on a health-related topic, deciding to write about the impact of rap on the music scene probably won't be allowed, but there may be some sort of leeway. For example, if you're really interested in current events but your teacher wants you to write a research paper on a history topic, you may be able to choose a topic that fits both categories, like exploring the relationship between the US and North Korea. No matter what, always get your research paper topic approved by your teacher first before you begin writing.

113 Good Research Paper Topics

Below are 113 good research topics to help you get you started on your paper. We've organized them into ten categories to make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Arts/Culture

• Discuss the main differences in art from the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance .
• Analyze the impact a famous artist had on the world.
• How is sexism portrayed in different types of media (music, film, video games, etc.)? Has the amount/type of sexism changed over the years?
• How has the music of slaves brought over from Africa shaped modern American music?
• How has rap music evolved in the past decade?
• How has the portrayal of minorities in the media changed?

Current Events

• What have been the impacts of China's one child policy?
• How have the goals of feminists changed over the decades?
• How has the Trump presidency changed international relations?
• Analyze the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
• What factors contributed to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
• What have been the impacts of states which have increased their minimum wage?
• How do US immigration laws compare to immigration laws of other countries?
• How have the US's immigration laws changed in the past few years/decades?
• How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
• What impact has the Affordable Care Act had on healthcare in the US?
• What factors contributed to the UK deciding to leave the EU (Brexit)?
• What factors contributed to China becoming an economic power?
• Discuss the history of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies  (some of which tokenize the S&P 500 Index on the blockchain) .
• Do students in schools that eliminate grades do better in college and their careers?
• Do students from wealthier backgrounds score higher on standardized tests?
• Do students who receive free meals at school get higher grades compared to when they weren't receiving a free meal?
• Do students who attend charter schools score higher on standardized tests than students in public schools?
• Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
• How does giving each student access to an iPad or laptop affect their studies?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Montessori Method ?
• Do children who attend preschool do better in school later on?
• What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
• How does the US education system compare to education systems in other countries?
• What impact does mandatory physical education classes have on students' health?
• Which methods are most effective at reducing bullying in schools?
• Do homeschoolers who attend college do as well as students who attended traditional schools?
• Does offering tenure increase or decrease quality of teaching?
• How does college debt affect future life choices of students?
• Should graduate students be able to form unions?

• What are different ways to lower gun-related deaths in the US?
• How and why have divorce rates changed over time?
• Is affirmative action still necessary in education and/or the workplace?
• Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?
• How has stem cell research impacted the medical field?
• How can human trafficking be reduced in the United States/world?
• Should people be able to donate organs in exchange for money?
• Which types of juvenile punishment have proven most effective at preventing future crimes?
• Has the increase in US airport security made passengers safer?
• Analyze the immigration policies of certain countries and how they are similar and different from one another.
• Several states have legalized recreational marijuana. What positive and negative impacts have they experienced as a result?
• Do tariffs increase the number of domestic jobs?
• Which prison reforms have proven most effective?
• Should governments be able to censor certain information on the internet?
• Which methods/programs have been most effective at reducing teen pregnancy?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
• How effective are different exercise regimes for losing weight and maintaining weight loss?
• How do the healthcare plans of various countries differ from each other?
• What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
• What are the pros and cons of genetically modified foods?
• Which methods are most effective for improving memory?
• What can be done to lower healthcare costs in the US?
• What factors contributed to the current opioid crisis?
• Analyze the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic .
• Are low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
• How much exercise should the average adult be getting each week?
• Which methods are most effective to get parents to vaccinate their children?
• What are the pros and cons of clean needle programs?
• How does stress affect the body?
• Discuss the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
• What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
• Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation?
• How has New Orleans and the government's response to natural disasters changed since Hurricane Katrina?
• What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
• What were the impacts of British rule in India ?
• Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?
• What were the successes and failures of the women's suffrage movement in the United States?
• What were the causes of the Civil War?
• How did Abraham Lincoln's assassination impact the country and reconstruction after the Civil War?
• Which factors contributed to the colonies winning the American Revolution?
• What caused Hitler's rise to power?
• Discuss how a specific invention impacted history.
• What led to Cleopatra's fall as ruler of Egypt?
• How has Japan changed and evolved over the centuries?
• What were the causes of the Rwandan genocide ?

• Why did Martin Luther decide to split with the Catholic Church?
• Analyze the history and impact of a well-known cult (Jonestown, Manson family, etc.)
• How did the sexual abuse scandal impact how people view the Catholic Church?
• How has the Catholic church's power changed over the past decades/centuries?
• What are the causes behind the rise in atheism/ agnosticism in the United States?
• What were the influences in Siddhartha's life resulted in him becoming the Buddha?
• How has media portrayal of Islam/Muslims changed since September 11th?

Science/Environment

• How has the earth's climate changed in the past few decades?
• How has the use and elimination of DDT affected bird populations in the US?
• Analyze how the number and severity of natural disasters have increased in the past few decades.
• Analyze deforestation rates in a certain area or globally over a period of time.
• How have past oil spills changed regulations and cleanup methods?
• How has the Flint water crisis changed water regulation safety?
• What are the pros and cons of fracking?
• What impact has the Paris Climate Agreement had so far?
• What have NASA's biggest successes and failures been?
• How can we improve access to clean water around the world?
• Does ecotourism actually have a positive impact on the environment?
• Should the US rely on nuclear energy more?
• What can be done to save amphibian species currently at risk of extinction?
• What impact has climate change had on coral reefs?
• How are black holes created?
• Are teens who spend more time on social media more likely to suffer anxiety and/or depression?
• How will the loss of net neutrality affect internet users?
• Analyze the history and progress of self-driving vehicles.
• How has the use of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
• Has social media made people more or less connected?
• What progress has currently been made with artificial intelligence ?
• Do smartphones increase or decrease workplace productivity?
• What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
• How is Google search affecting our intelligence?
• When is the best age for a child to begin owning a smartphone?
• Has frequent texting reduced teen literacy rates?

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Even great research paper topics won't give you a great research paper if you don't hone your topic before and during the writing process. Follow these three tips to turn good research paper topics into great papers.

#1: Figure Out Your Thesis Early

Before you start writing a single word of your paper, you first need to know what your thesis will be. Your thesis is a statement that explains what you intend to prove/show in your paper. Every sentence in your research paper will relate back to your thesis, so you don't want to start writing without it!

As some examples, if you're writing a research paper on if students learn better in same-sex classrooms, your thesis might be "Research has shown that elementary-age students in same-sex classrooms score higher on standardized tests and report feeling more comfortable in the classroom."

If you're writing a paper on the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might be "While the dispute between the North and South over slavery is the most well-known cause of the Civil War, other key causes include differences in the economies of the North and South, states' rights, and territorial expansion."

#2: Back Every Statement Up With Research

Remember, this is a research paper you're writing, so you'll need to use lots of research to make your points. Every statement you give must be backed up with research, properly cited the way your teacher requested. You're allowed to include opinions of your own, but they must also be supported by the research you give.

#3: Do Your Research Before You Begin Writing

You don't want to start writing your research paper and then learn that there isn't enough research to back up the points you're making, or, even worse, that the research contradicts the points you're trying to make!

Get most of your research on your good research topics done before you begin writing. Then use the research you've collected to create a rough outline of what your paper will cover and the key points you're going to make. This will help keep your paper clear and organized, and it'll ensure you have enough research to produce a strong paper.

What's Next?

Are you also learning about dynamic equilibrium in your science class? We break this sometimes tricky concept down so it's easy to understand in our complete guide to dynamic equilibrium .

Thinking about becoming a nurse practitioner? Nurse practitioners have one of the fastest growing careers in the country, and we have all the information you need to know about what to expect from nurse practitioner school .

Want to know the fastest and easiest ways to convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius? We've got you covered! Check out our guide to the best ways to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit (or vice versa).

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

Student and Parent Forum

Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub.PrepScholar.com , allow you to interact with your peers and the PrepScholar staff. See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process. Ask questions; get answers.

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Improve With Our Famous Guides

• For All Students

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 160+ SAT Points

How to Get a Perfect 1600, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 800 on Each SAT Section:

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading

Score 800 on SAT Writing

Series: How to Get to 600 on Each SAT Section:

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading

Score 600 on SAT Writing

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

What SAT Target Score Should You Be Aiming For?

15 Strategies to Improve Your SAT Essay

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 4+ ACT Points

How to Get a Perfect 36 ACT, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 36 on Each ACT Section:

36 on ACT English

36 on ACT Math

36 on ACT Reading

36 on ACT Science

Series: How to Get to 24 on Each ACT Section:

24 on ACT English

24 on ACT Math

24 on ACT Reading

24 on ACT Science

What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

ACT Vocabulary You Must Know

ACT Writing: 15 Tips to Raise Your Essay Score

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

Is the ACT easier than the SAT? A Comprehensive Guide

Should you retake your SAT or ACT?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Stay Informed

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Looking for Graduate School Test Prep?

Check out our top-rated graduate blogs here:

GRE Online Prep Blog

GMAT Online Prep Blog

TOEFL Online Prep Blog

Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

TODAY'S HOURS:

Research Topic Ideas

• Picking a Topic
• Area & Interdisciplinary Studies
• Behavioral & Social Sciences
• Business, Economics, & Management
• Current Events and Controversial Issues
• Education & Social Work
• Health Sciences

Astronomy Topics

Biology topics, chemistry and biochemistry topics, computer science and information technology & informatics topics, engineering topics, geography, planning, & environment, mathematics topics, physics topics, related guides.

• Research Process by Liz Svoboda Last Updated Mar 1, 2024 6323 views this year
• Big Bang theory
• Black holes
• Curiosity Rover
• Dwarf galaxies
• Earth-size planets
• Gravitational lensing
• Hubble telescope
• Kepler telescope
• Philae probe
• Remote sensing
• Sagan effect
• Spectroscopy
• Stellar spectra
• Superclusters

Related subject guide and suggested database

• Physics and Astronomy: A Guide to Library Research by Reference Librarians Last Updated Nov 3, 2023 61 views this year

Online books and journals, primarily in the life and physical sciences, technology, and medicine, as well as business and the social sciences

Includes over 2,000 journals and 35,000 books published by Elsevier Science and its subsidiary publishers, including Academic Press, Cell Press, Pergamon, Mosby, and Saunders journals. Coverage is particularly strong for the life and physical sciences, medicine, and technical fields, but also includes some social sciences and humanities. Includes chemistry, chemical engineering, clinical medicine, computer science, earth & planetary sciences, economics, engineering, energy & technology, environmental science & technology, life sciences, materials science, mathematics, physics, astronomy.  

• Algae blooms
• Biological warfare
• Bioluminescence
• Butterfly migration
• Circadian rhythm
• Coral reefs
• De-extinction
• Dismal Swamp
• Endangered species
• Fertilizers
• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
• Human genome map
• Invasive species
• Mass extinction
• Mutagenesis
• Neural systems
• Neurobiology of sleep
• Oil spill effects
• Organic farming
• Primate language
• Rainforest conservation
• Teratogenesis
• Wetland restoration
• Biology: A Guide to Library Research by Reference Librarians Last Updated Mar 12, 2024 78 views this year

Collection of five major collections in biology, environmental sciences, ecology, and agriculture.

Includes these collections:

• Agricola: Millions of records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Library dating back to 1970. The citations include journal articles, monographs, theses, patents, software, audiovisual materials, and technical reports related to agriculture.  
• Biological & Agricultural Index Plus: 1983-present. Agriculture, animal husbandry, botany, cytology, ecology, entomology, environmental science, fishery sciences, food science, forestry, genetics, horticulture, microbiology, plant pathology, soil science, veterinary medicine, zoology.  
• Environment Complete: Coverage in applicable areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, renewable energy sources, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more.  
• GreenFILE: Articles, books and government documents on global warming, environmental protection and renewable energy.  
• Wildlife & Ecology Studies Worldwide: Covers 1935 & earlier to the present, and is the world's largest index to literature on wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Most of the records in this database are from Wildlife Review Abstracts, which offers a global perspective and is the most comprehensive resource on wildlife information. Major topic areas include studies of individual species, habitat types, hunting, economics, wildlife behavior, management techniques, diseases, ecotourism, zoology, taxonomy and much more.  
• Alkali metals
• Bioenergetics
• Buffer solutions
• Carbon cature
• Carbon dating
• Chemical carcinogens
• Chemical warfare
• Desalinization
• Electromagnetic radiation
• Oxidation numbers
• Periodic table
• Pyrotechnics
• Radioactive waste
• Silver iodide
• Synthetic DNA
• Water fluoridation
• Chemistry: A Guide to Library Research by Reference Librarians Last Updated Dec 13, 2023 101 views this year
• Artificial intelligence
• Biometric signature
• Computer animation
• Computer composed music
• Computer forensics
• Computer modeling
• Gamification
• General Data Protection Regulation
• Intelligent databases
• Internet of things
• Machine language
• Mobile computing
• Social media literacy
• Ubiquitous design
• Voice recognition
• Computer Science: A Guide to Library Research by Reference Librarians Last Updated Mar 5, 2024 51 views this year

Full-text access to IEEE transactions, journals, magazines, conference proceedings, standards, and online courses, plus related e-books. Covers engineering, computer science, technology, and physics.

IEEE Courses uses the best educational courses from IEEE conferences and workshops around the world and delivers them in interactive video format. You can earn Continuing Education Unit (CEU) credits and Professional Development Hours (PDH). To set up remote access to IEEE Xplore on a mobile device, please follow these steps:

• On the mobile device, use a browser to visit the IEEE Xplore website through the U-M Library's access.  
• Click on the blue tab "My Settings" in the middle of the screen, then choose "Remote Access."  
• Follow the instructions to pair your device. Users will be asked to sign in with an IEEE personal account before pairing.  
• This device can now be used off-site for 90 days to access IEEE Xplore. Users must go to IEEE Xplore on the paired device and log in with their IEEE personal account to access the roaming subscription.

Please note that after 90 days, users will be prompted to again pair their device and can follow the same steps as the initial pairing.

• 3D printing
• Additive design
• Aeroacoustics
• Aerothermodynamics
• Air turbulence
• Analytical mechanics
• Boundary layer
• Carbon capture
• Composite materials
• Computer-aided design (CAD)
• Computer-aided engineering (CAE)
• Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)
• Design optimization
• Electric cars
• Fiber optics
• Finite element analysis (FEA)
• Fluid dynamics
• Flutter phenomena
• Information theory
• Geoengineering
• High horsepower in cars
• Hybrid vehicles
• Hydroforming
• Laser applications
• Liquid crystals
• Nanomaterials
• Nanotechnology
• Naturalistic decision making
• Nuclear power
• Stereo imaging
• Engineering: A Guide to Library Research by Reference Librarians Last Updated Mar 12, 2024 54 views this year
• Air pollution
• Algae bloom
• Alternative fuels
• Beach erosion
• Carbon footprint
• Climate forcing
• Compostable plastic
• Dymaxion House
• Earth-sheltered structures
• Green cities
• Green infrastructure
• Natual resource conservation
• Nitrogen farming
• Ozone depletion
• Pollution reduction
• Rip currents
• Soil contamination
• Sustainable design
• Three Gorges Dam
• Tiny houses
• Toxic dumping in oceans
• Water conservation
• Water pollution
• Geography, Planning, and Environment: A Guide to Library Research by Reference Librarians Last Updated Feb 23, 2024 48 views this year
• Applied statistics
• Bioinformatics
• Convex geometry
• Game theory
• Millennium Prize problems
• Probability theory
• Random walks
• Representation theory
• Riemannian geometry
• Theory of chaos
• Turing, Alan
• Turing patterns
• Mathematics: A Guide to Library Research by Reference Librarians Last Updated Mar 6, 2024 30 views this year

Online access to Mathematical Reviews , the journal of record which indexes, reviews, and abstracts the published mathematical research literature. 1940-present, with some earlier content.

• Antiparticles
• Bohr's radius
• Bose–Einstein condensate
• Dark matter
• Gravitational waves
• Heat death of the universe
• Higgs boson
• Manhattan Project
• Nanofabrication
• Quantum entanglement
• Space elevator
• Superstring theory
• Thermodynamics 
• Wave-particle duality

World-wide literature (mainly journal articles and conference proceedings papers) in astronomy, physics, electronics and electrical engineering, computers and control, and information technology.

Hosted on Engineering Village platform. Covers physics, electrical & electronic engineering, communications, computer science, control engineering, information technology, manufacturing & mechanical engineering, operations research, material science, oceanography, engineering mathematics, nuclear engineering, environmental science, geophysics, nanotechnology, biomedical technology, and biophysics.

• << Previous: Humanities
• Last Updated: Mar 1, 2024 1:06 PM
• URL: https://libguides.umflint.edu/topics

A User-Centered Model of a Science Library

• Published: 22 May 2023
• Volume 50 , pages 69–73, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• V. K. Stepanov 1 , 2  

73 Accesses

Explore all metrics

This study presents a vision of the science library as a social institution whose functions embrace the information support of research activities to organizing and managing the entire system of scientific communications of the various domains of academic knowledge. The user-centered model radically changes the composition and proportions of different types of library work. The key information support of the library user is delegated to intelligent software tools that ensure an incomparably greater coverage and depth of service at a colossal reduction in labor costs. The main attention of librarians can turn to organizing, moderating, and providing material support of all possible formats of live communication as the most efficient kind of communication as well as to implementing training programs intended to help users to master their skills in using digital information resources and research activity tools.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

The Ohio Library and Information Network is a consortium of Ohio’s college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio; currently, the membership of OhioLINK includes 117 libraries.

It is indicative to track the history of the Norilsk Nickel science library, which was once among the leaders of Russia’s scientific and technical libraries. With a scale of activity comparable to an average regional science library, the Norilsk Nickel library was, nonetheless, closed by the head company as failing to meet the imperative of the times.

As experimentally established by A. Mekhrabyan, in direct communication, only 7% of information is transferred verbally (by words), 38% is transferred by acoustic means (tone of voice, articulation, intonation), and 55% is transferred non-acoustically (facial expression, gestures, and other kinds of body language).

These kinds of data include the current data of laboratory experiments uploaded to the Web, images from telescopes, surveillance cameras, all sorts of sensors, etc.

Evans, G. and Schonfeld, R.C., It’s not what libraries hold; it’s who libraries serve: Seeking a user-centered future for academic libraries, OhioLink, Ithaka S+R, 2020. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.312608

Melent’eva, Yu.P., The role of the traditional library in the context of digitalization of society, Bibliografiya , 2019, no. 2, pp. 27–33.

Dutchak, E.E., Polezhaeva, T.V., and Shepel’, M.O., Universitetskaya biblioteka v tsifrovoi srede: priglashenie k obsuzhdeniyu, Nauka Nauchnaya Inf. , 2019 vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 53–62. https://doi.org/10.24108/2658-3143-2019-2-1-53-62

Article   Google Scholar  

Red’kina, N.S., Development vectors for research libraries: The review of the key reports at The IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2019, Bibliosfera , 2020, no. 2, pp. 71–81. https://doi.org/10.20913/1815-3186-2020-2-71-81

Calvert, S., Future themes and forecasts for research libraries and emerging technologies, Kennedy, M.L., Lynch, C., and O’Brien, J., Eds., Association of Research Libraries, 2020. https://doi.org/10.29242/report.emergingtech2020.forecasts

Lippincott, S., Mapping the current landscape of research library engagement with emerging technologies in research and learning, Kennedy, M.L., Lynch, C., and Calvert, S., Eds., Association of Research Libraries, Born-Digital, Coalition for Networked Information, and EDUCAUSE, 2021. https://doi.org/10.29242/report.emergingtech2020.landscape

Mehrabian, A., Silent Messages , Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971.

Google Scholar  

Padilla, T., Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries , Dublin, Ohio: OCLC, 2019. https://doi.org/10.25333/xk7z-9g97

Book   Google Scholar  

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences (INION RAN), 117418, Moscow, Russia

V. K. Stepanov

Department of Information and Analytical Activities, Moscow State Linguistic University, 119034, Moscow, Russia

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to V. K. Stepanov .

Ethics declarations

The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Translated by S. Kuznetsov

About this article

Stepanov, V.K. A User-Centered Model of a Science Library. Sci. Tech. Inf. Proc. 50 , 69–73 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3103/S0147688223010136

Download citation

Received : 21 December 2022

Published : 22 May 2023

Issue Date : March 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3103/S0147688223010136

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• user-centered science library
• communication paradigm
• scientific communication
• knowledge society
• reconceptualization of library activity
• scientific communication formats
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Write my thesis
• Thesis writers
• Buy thesis papers
• Bachelor thesis
• Master's thesis
• Thesis editing services
• Thesis proofreading services
• Buy a thesis online
• Write my dissertation
• Dissertation proposal help
• Pay for dissertation
• Custom dissertation
• Dissertation help online
• Buy dissertation online
• Cheap dissertation
• Dissertation editing services
• Write my research paper
• Buy research paper online
• Pay for research paper
• Research paper help
• Order research paper
• Custom research paper
• Cheap research paper
• Research papers for sale
• Thesis subjects
• How It Works

80+ Science Research Paper Topics Ideas For Students

Essay writing or writing dissertation is an integral part of education at any level, middle school, high school, or college. Some of the most common essays are on science research topics, and they are also quite interesting. However, choosing research paper topics isn’t as straightforward as you’d like. You’ll need to carry out a survey on and draw inspiration from several scientific research topics before finally choosing one. Choosing science topics, especially if they are argumentative essay topics , to write about can be a frustrating task, especially when science is a pretty wide subject. If you need inspiration on interesting science topics, we’ll give you some science research paper ideas. But, first, let’s talk about how to choose the best science research paper topics – it makes things easier.

What Are Some Science Topics You Can Write About?

Interesting science research topics, ideas of science research topics for high school students, science research topics for college students, science research topics for middle school, scientific research question examples, science presentation ideas, cool science topics to research, ideas of scientific topics for research on nanotechnology, fascinating ideas for science research projects, interesting science topics for high school research papers, tips for choosing science research topics.

Being a very broad subject, students often find choosing a science topic for a research paper difficult. However, the secret is knowing what scientific research questions will make for a good paper, and what people will want to read. So, when choosing science topics for papers, here are tips you can follow to make the task easier.

• Choose cool science topics you’re interested in and that’ll interest your readers.
• Search online for research question examples science for ideas on what your paper should be about.
• Avoid choosing too-broad research topics for high school, to ensure your work is well detailed.
• Consider contemporary scientific research questions concerning recent happenings; they can be fun to write
• Read your notes and online academic papers for inspiration on good science research paper topics.
• Choose simple but highly informative research topics for high school students.
• Choose good science topics you have some knowledge of and can confidently talk about.
• Learn how to choose science topics for high school to make things easier.
• Be familiar with the dos and don’ts of choosing scientific research paper topics.
• Choose a scientific topic for research papers that has enough accessible information.

The Dos and Don’ts of Choosing Science Topics

Knowing the dos and don’ts of choosing a science title helps you select a good topic and ultimately write an outstanding paper. So, when searching for science topics for presentations,

• Do understand that there are different topics in science you can research on;
• Do read extensively for science research paper ideas; it helps you know what to write about;
• Don’t include words like “Research of” or “Study of” in your chosen science topics to research;
• Don’t choose high school science research paper topics with scanty or inaccessible information available;
• Do check online for interesting science research ideas on how to write your paper;
• Feel free to ask your instructor, colleagues, or seniors for scientific research ideas.

When searching for interesting science topics or social media research topics related to science to writing on, you will find different ones on different subjects, which can be confusing. You can follow the tips we listed for choosing science-related topics for a research paper. Meanwhile, here are some science paper topics you can use if none is forthcoming.

• Is there a move for the Covid-19 vaccine?
• What “flattening the curve” means
• Molecular evidence of humans interbreeding with Neanderthals
• Impact of cardio exercise on heart health
• The importance of exploring the solar system
• Can a comet strike the earth?
• The Hubble Space Telescope
• Top ten chemistry careers
• Acid rain effect aquatic plants’ growth
• Room color and human behavior
• How can plants grow in pots?
• Water’s surface tension weight capacity
• What does the paleo diet mean?
• Is Pluto still a planet?
• The future of commercial space flight
• Do you inherit fingerprint patterns?
• Ways in which handwashing prevents the spread of the Covid-19 virus
• Molecular biological research on rare genetic disorders impact on understanding cancer
• Do men pass on genetic abnormalities to their posterity as they age?
• How can men’s exercise affect the traits they pass on to their children?
• Is there really life on Mars; has there ever been?
• Ways of solving the problem of junk space
• The importance of Dark Matter
• Black holes
• Different ways to keep ice from defrosting
• Are pet hairs harmful to the human body?
• Some of the germs you’ve seen in your school
• The effect of music on your assimilation ability
• The types of food dogs prefer the best
• Good hygienic practices for keeping clean
• Foods that develop molds the fastest
• How different body parts aid the effective functioning of the system
• Do worms in the soil really affect plant growth and how?
• Can light brightness make plants grow well?
• What kinds of fertilizers work best, chemical or natural?
• Can mice (or any animal of your choice) learn?
• How can age affect the human reaction?
• Why does water boil faster when put in salt?
• Can food affect the heart, how?
• Can background noise interfere with learning and assimilation?
• Can Higgs Boson destroy the universe?
• Effects of sunspots on man
• Should humans live in space?
• The most important technological innovations in medicinal chemistry in recent years
• The danger of chemicals emitted from pharmaceutical companies
• The importance of big data and bioinformatics to chemical research
• The sugar chemistry behind making candy
• Biomacromolecules
• Trends in India’s medicinal chemistry research
• Nuclear fusion
• Reproduction in mammals
• How do fish mate?
• How useful are science museums in teaching science?
• Why do birds have beautiful feathers?
• The safety of offshore drilling
• The importance of climate change legislation
• Hydraulic fracking’s negative effects
• Uses of microelectronics
• Nanotechnology in medicine
• Nanotechnology for cancer treatment
• Can nanofibers repair brain injuries?
• Effect of nanomedicine on human lifespan
• Nanomaterial
• How nanotechnology helps in patient diagnosis
• How to reduce antibiotic use in agriculture
• The ethics of stem cell research
• The best leukemia treatment
• Gene therapy
• Causes of skin cancer
• Colonoscopy testing on colon cancer
• Why eliminating malaria is difficult
• The possibility of predicting the next pandemic
• Do childhood vaccines prevent diseases?
• How cells shield the body against diseases
• Should wild animals interact with humans?
• Are self-driving cars good?
• Regulating sugar use
• Different types of headaches
• Can migraine cause death?
• The ideal weight for living long

Feel free to choose from this scientific research topics list for your science research paper. There are many things to research where science is concerned, including stem research topics , among others. There is no shortage of scientific topics to research and choosing the best one gets easy when you know how to. If you’ve chosen a topic and you need help writing on them, you can contact our professional writing service. We have a team of experts who can write on any science topic and ensure you meet your deadline.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Copy of Library DIY

• Choosing a Topic
• Understanding my Assignment
• Possible Topics
• From Topic to Research Question
• What Types of Sources I Need
• Where to Search
• Search Tips
• Library Does Not Have Item
• Terms & Keywords to Search With
• These Do Not Describe My Need
• Looking for Articles
• Peer-reviewed Articles
• Newspaper Articles
• I Need Full-Text
• Found Too Little or Too Much
• Google Scholar and Library Links
• Libraries Do Not Have Item
• Which Items are Relevant to My Topic
• Find More from What You Have
• Looking for Books
• Books on My Topic
• Browse Print Books
• Primary Sources
• Help Searching
• Looking for Journals
• Looking for a Specific Journal
• Information About a Specific Journal
• Significant Journals in My Field
• Company, Industry, or Market Information
• Looking for a Thesis or Dissertation
• Items in Other Languages
• Help in My Subject Area
• Looking for a Specific Book
• Search for a Book
• Where to Find a Call Number
• Looking for a Specific Article
• Looking for a Textbook for My Class
• Materials from Instructor on Reserve
• Help with a Citation
• Looking for a Specific Video
• Peer Reviewed Articles
• Scholarly or Peer Reviewed Articles
• Terms or Keywords to Search With
• Looking for a Textbook
• Is Book This Scholarly
• Book Is Checked Out
• View Holds & Renew Library Materials
• Which Items Are Relevant to My Topic
• Appropriate Sources to Use
• What Does Peer Reviewed Means
• Is This Book Scholarly
• Significant Work in My Field
• Journals in My Field
• Who Has Cited A Work?
• What Are Archival Resources?
• What Does Archives & Special Collections Have?
• Citing Sources in APA Format
• Citing Sources in MLA Format
• Quoting and Paraphrasing
• Avoiding Plagiarism

I Need Help Integrating Sources into My Paper

• Saving and Organizing What I've Found
• Generate a Quick Citation
• Manage My Citations
• Troubleshooting Printing Issues
• Problem with a Library Resource
• Trouble Accessing a Resource or Item
• Article Linker is Not Working
• E-book is Not Available
• Book I Need Is Checked Out
• Do I Need to Pay for an Article
• Where to Find a Call Number in the Library
• Not a Current Student
• Help Logging In

Effective Research Papers = Evidence from Scholars/Experts + Your Ideas

• Use the work of experts to formulate, support, and refine your own ideas and to build your credibility as a scholar.
• Cite your information sources to properly credit others for their thoughts and work.
• Supporting evidence from scholars and experts will strengthen your argument or thesis statement.
• Research and academic writing is how you participate in scholarly conversations with topic experts.
• Your voice and your analysis are essential to the research paper or project.

Incorporating Sources into Your Academic Writing: Three Main Ways

• Direct Quotations:  Learn more about  Quoting .
• Paraphrasing:  Learn more about  Paraphrasing .
• Summarizing:  Summarizing is similar to paraphrasing, but is used when you are trying to give an overview of many ideas. Like with paraphrasing, you don't use quotation marks, but you will need citations.

Three Elements for Integrated Source Information

• Introductory phrase to the source material:  Learn about  Signal and Lead-in Phrases  from the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University.
• Source material:  A direct quote, paraphrase, or summary with proper citation
• Analysis of the source material:  Your response, interpretations, or arguments regarding the source material should introduce or follow it.
• Watch the  Quoting, Summarizing, and Paraphrasing (2020) video by Jenna Goddard , Writing Center Coordinator for Thompson Rivers University, that compares/contrasts all three processes.
• Remember that all your sources should relate to your thesis or central argument(s), whether they are in agreement or not. It is a good idea to address all sides of the argument or thesis to make your position stronger.
• Schedule an appointment with the Writing Center for more help with integrating sources into your paper.
• << Previous: Avoiding Plagiarism
• Next: Saving and Organizing What I've Found >>
• Last Updated: Apr 10, 2024 10:41 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.tamucc.edu/c.php?g=1393779

Using pulp and paper waste to scrub carbon from emissions

Researchers at McGill University have come up with an innovative approach to improve the energy efficiency of carbon conversion, using waste material from pulp and paper production.

The technique they've pioneered using the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan not only reduces the energy required to convert carbon into useful products, but also reduces overall waste in the environment.

"We are one of the first groups to combine biomass recycling or utilization with CO 2 capture," said Ali Seifitokaldani, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Electrocatalysis for Renewable Energy Production and Conversion. The research team, from McGill's Electrocatalysis Lab, published their findings in the journal RSC Sustainability .

Capturing carbon emissions is one of the most exciting emerging tools to fight climate change. The biggest challenge is figuring out what to do with the carbon once the emissions have been removed, especially since capturing CO 2 can be expensive. The next hurdle is that transforming CO 2 into useful products takes energy. Researchers want to make the conversion process as efficient and profitable as possible.

• Energy and Resources
• Energy Technology
• Energy and the Environment
• Environmental Science
• Renewable Energy
• Global Warming
• Hazardous waste
• Photosynthesis
• Climate change mitigation
• Radioactive waste
• Carbon cycle
• Carbon dioxide

Story Source:

Materials provided by McGill University . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Roger Lin, Haoyan Yang, Hanyu Zheng, Mahdi Salehi, Amirhossein Farzi, Poojan Patel, Xiao Wang, Jiaxun Guo, Kefang Liu, Zhengyuan Gao, Xiaojia Li, Ali Seifitokaldani. Efficient integration of carbon dioxide reduction and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural oxidation at high current density . RSC Sustainability , 2024; 2 (2): 445 DOI: 10.1039/D3SU00379E

Cite This Page :

Explore More

• 3D Mouth of an Ancient Jawless Fish
• Connecting Lab-Grown Brain Cells
• Device: Self-Healing Materials, Drug Delivery
• How We Perceive Bitter Taste
• Next-Generation Digital Displays
• Feeling Insulted? How to Rid Yourself of Anger
• Pregnancy Accelerates Biological Aging
• Tiny Plastic Particles Are Found Everywhere
• What's Quieter Than a Fish? A School of Them
• Do Odd Bones Belong to Gigantic Ichthyosaurs?

Trending Topics

Strange & offbeat.