Citation analysis of articles published in journals of Information Science related to the theme information management

Abstract

This is a bibliometric study that analyzes citations in articles whose theme is information management. The articles were published in the journals indexed on the Base de dados Referenciais de Artigos de Periódicos em Ciência da Informação (BRAPCI - Referential Database of Journals Articles in Information Science) from 2000 to 2011. The study aimed to: a) identify the Brazilian journal which has published more articles on the theme of information management; b) identify the author that has published more articles, under single or multiple authorship; c) list the most used keywords in the articles; d) verify the most cited authors, under single or multiple authorship; e) study the position of the literature cited in the references in relation to the type of source or bibliographic support. To accomplish those objectives, this study used the method of citation analysis, which investigates the relations between the referring documents and the referred ones, entirely or in parts. The corpus was constituted by 195 articles. The central focus of analysis was the bibliographic material cited by the authors in their articles, which was of 4287 citations. The following softwares were used to support the data analysis: BibExcel, CiteSpace, Statistica 8.0, Dataview, INFOTRANS e Matrisme. The results show that the journal which has published more articles concerning the theme information management was the journal "Ciência da Informação", with the amount of 13,8% of the corpus analyzed (27 articles). The more significant period of publication was the years of 2007 and 2008. The authors that published more articles were Marta Lígia Pomim Valentim (8 articles), Ricardo Rodrigues Barbosa (7 articles), Isa Maria Freire and Maria Inês Tomael (both with 6 articles). In what concerns the keywords registered, “information management" represents 12,12% of the total amount (101 results). The other terms found were "knowledge management" (4,44%, 37 results), "competitive intelligence" (1,68%, 14 results), "information science" (1,44%, 12 results) and "information" (1,32%, 11 results). In what concerns the citation analysis, the most cited authors were: Davenport, T.H. (67 results), Choo, C.W. (57 results), Barreto, A.A. (38 results), Nonaka, I. (37 results) and Valentim, M.L.P. (36 results). The most cited type of source or bibliographic support was printed books (35,4%, 1518 results), followed by articles published in printed journals (22,8%, 981 results). The lifetime of the literature studied is of seven years. It is understood that a great part of the literature studied is not recent, on the contrary, the most consulted authors for the theme were the traditional authors of the Information Science area. This is the reason for the focus to lie on books, for the lifetime of the literature to be intermediate, and for the constant repetition of authors cited in the articles.