TRENDS AND RESEARCH COLLABORATIONS IN LIS PUBLICATIONS OUTPUTS IN NIGERIA IN WEB OF SCIENCE 2000 2016

Abstract

This study investigated trends and research collaboration in library and information science (LIS) publications outputs in Nigeria from 2000 2016 in the Web of Science (WOS) database. In accomplishing the research purpose, four research objectives and four research questions were formulated to guide the study. A descriptive research survey design was adopted. 270 articles formed the population of the study and also used as the sample size, mean while a census sampling technique was used with a checklist as instrument for data collection. The study was limited to the use of Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) all in WOS to ascertain the trends of publication outputs in LIS for Nigeria while publication counts and analysis were used to analyze data based on the research questions. Results of the study showed among others that, there was an increasing and fluctuating trend in the annual publication outputs in LIS in Nigeria, also multiple authors dominated the published articles and researchers in Nigeria prefer to collaborate more with their colleagues within the same institution, whereas, there was a limited collaboration with foreign authors. Based on the above results, it was recommended that; researchers should endeavor to publish in journals with high impact factors, especially journals indexed in WOS, Scopus or Google Scholar; collaborations with foreign researchers should be encouraged to help in knowledge transfer and resource sharing; also, publishing with experienced colleagues can enhance research expertise and skills transfer among other recommendations.