Using text analysis to study doctoral-level library and information science research trends in India

Abstract

This study attempts to identify research trends in doctoral-level library and information science research in India. The study uses topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify research trends by collecting relevant sections from the full-text of theses awarded in the last ten years by Indian universities in the discipline of library and information science. The topic modelling results show that the entire corpus can be classified into ten topics, including information communication technology and its application in libraries. The topic-wise trends indicate that ‘ICT and its application in libraries’ are still the prime themes of choice among doctoral-level research in Indian LIS schools, followed by studies on ‘Information seeking behaviour’. The growth-wise trend analysis suggests the decline in the interest in ‘Bibliometrics/Scientometrics’ and ‘Webometrics/Website evaluation studies’. The findings of the study will be of help to academics studying the development of LIS research, as well as aspiring doctoral-level scholars who are to identify a topic for their research work.