Creating a Medical Library Terms Taxonomy for Citation Analysis

Objective: To create a medical library terms taxonomy in order to find trends in the medical library literature. In order to explore trends in scholarly publishing by health sciences librarians in the last five years, we endeavored to examine keywords used in articles published in four health sciences library journals during this time. From our initial review we determined that: author-created keywords are not always based on a controlled vocabulary; MeSH subheadings do not include terms unique to the library field; and Library of Congress taxonomy is too broad. Thus, it was necessary to create a taxonomy by grouping similar keywords into categories in order to accurately identify trends. Methods: Citations from four health sciences library journals from 2016-2020 were exported from PubMed and EBSCO Academic Search Premier into EndNote X9. Keywords from all citations were exported from EndNote as a text file and then imported into Microsoft Excel. Pivot tables were used to determine the number of times each keyword was used and to aggregate identical keywords. A team of six librarians with a variety of skill sets and backgrounds reviewed each keyword to determine how to categorize and group terms to create a taxonomy. Results: 8,806 keywords from the journals were downloaded into spreadsheets and aggregated. Pivot tables were used to combine identical terms resulting in 2,801 unique keywords which are currently being categorized to complete the taxonomy. Conclusion: While choosing keywords without use of a controlled vocabulary when submitting a manuscript allows for flexibility and customization, and might result in better retrieval during natural language searching, what we discovered through this project is that choosing keywords without the use of a controlled vocabulary makes it difficult to see trends and to conduct a bibliometric analysis

Themes in Health Sciences Librarianship Literature, 2016-2020: A Keyword and Subject Analysis

Previous investigations into trends in Library and Information Science (LIS) literature have revealed changes in the topics librarians publish on over time, with older studies highlighting classification and indexing, and information retrieval and more recent studies highlighting keywords such as internet, information technology, digital libraries, and again, information retrieval. No similar investigation has been conducted on current publication trends by health sciences librarians. This study analyzes the top themes on which health sciences librarians published from 2016 to 2020 by examining the frequency of keywords. Keywords and subject headings were analyzed from The Journal of the Medical Library Association, Medical References Services Quarterly, The Journal of Hospital Librarianship, and The Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries. A total of 8,806 keywords were downloaded for analysis and organized into 292 categories during taxonomy creation. The ten most frequent themes were: libraries, information, education, humans, demography, librarian, geographical locations, research, electronic resources, and technology. The study also found that data, psychiatry and psychology, informatics, and publishing were other key themes, indicating that health sciences librarians are publishing on a wide range of topics. Some keywords that appeared only once, such as telecommuting and flexible staffing, suggest emerging areas of research for librarians

Data Set: Themes in Health Sciences Librarianship Literature, 2016-2020: A Keyword and Subject Analysis

Data set for Themes in Health Sciences Librarianship Literature, 2016-2020: A Keyword and Subject Analysis