Evolving Trends: A Bibliometric Analysis of Academic Librarians’ Publications at Twelve AAU Member Universities

Pete E. Pascuzzi, Jason B. Reed, and Greenley Goedde Creech*

The goal of this bibliometric study was to explore the broader publication patterns of academic librarians in both information and library science (ISLS) and interdisciplinary research for the years 2009 to 2023. Web of Science data were collected for 12 academic libraries. The results showed that while the number of ISLS publications has dropped, interdisciplinary publications have increased dramatically with a broad range of disciplines represented, and that collaborations in the medical sciences were a major contributor to this increase. The study suggests that some academic libraries have shifted their priorities over the past 15 years and that the assessment of libraries’ scholarly publications must evolve to capture this shift.

Introduction

Academic units are often under pressure to demonstrate their impact on the mission of their parent institution. The Association of American Universities (AAU) includes 71 leading research universities with membership indicators that include funded federal research, faculty awards, research citations, and book publications (Association of American Universities, 2025). Importantly, AAU uses only the Clarivate InCites Benchmarking and Analytics (Association of American Universities, 2025), and this database includes only publications that are indexed in Web of Science (WoS).

Academic libraries are no stranger to pressure, and academic libraries continually seek ways to communicate their value (ACRL Plan for Excellence, 2006; Evidence Base, 2021; Oakleaf, 2010). Many academic librarians are expected to engage in research, regardless of their employment category. When librarians are tenure-track faculty, their research efforts may be under increased scrutiny to achieve promotion. Librarians may initiate research related to their role with a library or collaborate on projects that leverage the librarian’s expertise with researchers in other disciplines.

Academic libraries are well-poised to contribute to the research mission of their parent institution. Library faculty and staff are steeped in the culture and resources of research, have a broad range of expertise, and actively seek collaboration (Evidence Base, 2021; Oakleaf, 2010). Despite this, many studies that focused on the research publications of academic librarians examined only publications in specific information science and library science (ISLS) journals (Blecic et al., 2017; Weller et al., 1999; Wiberley et al., 2023; Wiberley et al., 2006). To minimize confusion, the term information science and library science (ISLS) will be used rather than library and information science (LIS) because ISLS is a Web of Science (WoS) journal research category. A few studies examined publications without targeting specific ISLS journals (Borrego et al., 2018; Chang, 2018) searching the databases more broadly. While these studies are valuable, they each had inherent limitations.

Studies that focused only on ISLS journals limited the target journals because the data were manually coded. This approach must necessarily exclude interdisciplinary research because there are far too many non-ISLS journals to screen. For studies that considered interdisciplinary research, the authors had to impose other limitations due to the difficulty of attributing a publication to a library and a librarian.

Two of the authors of this study are tenure-track library faculty at Purdue University, an AAU member university, and sought to get a more detailed picture of the research publications of librarians at similar academic research libraries. There were four principal research questions:

1. What is the productivity of academic librarians across all document types and disciplines at a sample of AAU institutions?
2. Is there a change in ISLS publications for academic librarians over the last 15 years?
3. If there is a decline in ISLS publications, are academic librarians engaging in more interdisciplinary research?
4. How do the citation rates vary between ISLS and interdisciplinary research and between articles and reviews?

Literature Review

A series of four studies published from 1999 to 2023 specifically focused on the publishing patterns of U.S. academic librarians in important ISLS journals (Blecic et al., 2017; Weller et al., 1999; Wiberley et al., 2023; Wiberley et al., 2006). In each of these studies, articles were manually examined to determine whether the author was an academic librarian. This required the authors to limit the number of target journals. These seminal and invaluable studies provide a wealth of information on the productivity of librarians, co-authorship patterns, the importance of librarian tenure status and the characteristics of their parent institution.

The first of this series (Weller et al., 1999) examined the articles in 32 North American ISLS journals for the years 1993–1997. This study found that 1,515 academic librarians produced a total of 1,579 articles in the journals during the analyzed time. Most authors (78.35%) produced a single article in the period under consideration, and most (55.03%) of these articles had a single author. This study also produced a list of the 20 most productive academic libraries. Librarians had faculty status at nine of the institutions, eight of which were AAU members. Four additional institutions also belonged to the AAU. The authors of the study speculated that institution prestige and faculty status both contribute to productivity of librarians.

The second of this series (Wiberley et al., 2006) covered the years 1998–2002. The results of this study are comparable to the first, with 77.67% of academic librarians publishing a single article in five years, 58.91% of which had a single author. The authors did note a small decline in articles by academic librarians from 43.57% in 1993–1997 dropping to 39.56% in 1998–2002, but the cause and significance was not clear. In the top 20 libraries, librarians had faculty status at 12 with nine in the AAU. Six additional institutions were also AAU members.

The third in the series (Blecic et al., 2017) covered 10 years of data (2003–2012), although the authors also analyzed the data in two five-year chunks. While most academic librarians still produced a single article in each of the five-year periods (73.56% for 2003–2007 and 73.37% for 2008–2012), there was an increase in the percentage of authors who produced multiple articles. This study also noted a decline in the number of articles by academic librarians. The authors suggested that this decline could be the result of the decline in sole-authored articles with an increase in co-authored articles with two or more librarian authors. The number of institutions with tenure-track librarians increased to 19, with 10 in the AAU. One additional institution was an AAU member.

The fourth and most recent in the series (Wiberley et al., 2023) covered the years 2013–2017. Again, the percentage of academic librarians with a single article dropped slightly to 72.02%; however, more authors had multiple articles. This study noted an increase in the incident of academic librarians as co-authors. This helps to explain both the overall decline in the number of articles and the increase in number of articles for authors. The 2013–2017 top academic libraries list contains 23 institutions because of ties in position 20. Librarians had faculty status at 19 of the institutions, 10 of which were AAU members. Three additional institutions were also AAU members. Like previous studies, the authors noted that prestige of an institution and faculty status for academic librarians correlated with productivity.

Wiberely et al. (2023) suggested that future research into academic librarian publishing should broaden the scope to include other types of scholarly output, noting that it would entail focusing on a subset of academic librarians. Although they did not explicitly mention publications in non-ISLS journals, they speculated that traditional ISLS journals may not meet all the needs of academic librarians. Two previous studies (Borrego et al., 2018; Chang, 2018) pointed to the importance of interdisciplinary research for academic libraries.

Chang (2018) examined the interdisciplinary publications of librarian authors in non-ISLS journals indexed in WoS for the years 2005–2014. ISLS authors were defined in part by the occurrence of “library” or “information” in the address field of their publications. The search retrieved 4,567 articles, which was reduced to 1,270 after manual review. Further review created a subset of 479 articles by ISLS authors with verified ISLS educational backgrounds. This study showed that ISLS authors publish articles on diverse topics such as computer science, medicine, history, music, law, business, and education in non-ISLS journals. Most of the authors were affiliated with libraries and not ISLS departments. Strikingly, 41.3% of the ISLS authors had non-ISLS educational backgrounds which may be a contributing factor to the breadth of research.

Borrego, et al. (2018) took a similar approach, searching Scopus for the pattern “librar*” in the affiliation field for the years 2006–2015. This study included articles and reviews in all Scopus-indexed journals and retrieved more than 26,000 publications from 4,283 journals. The study revealed that the number of publications in ISLS journals was stable across the 10-year period but that there was a consistent increase in the publications in non-ISLS journals, starting at ,750 in 2006 and reaching nearly 1,400 in 2015. A detailed analysis of the affiliation data for 2015 revealed limitations on data interpretation (at least from the perspective of academic librarians) as 9% of the 2015 papers were false hits to nonlibrarians, 11% were attributable to library schools, and 13% were authors affiliated with the National Library of Medicine. Regardless of this limitation, this study revealed that librarian authors participate in a broad range of research, noting the prevalence of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Methods

Terminology

For the sake of clarity, the terminology in this paper conforms to the terminology used in WoS bibliometric records as much as possible, which will be indicated by quoting and capitalization. Thus, library and information science will be referred to as “Information Science and Library Science” (ISLS). In WoS, “Publication” refers to the “Source” publication (i.e., “Book,” “Journal” or “Conference”). WoS “Document Types” include “Articles,” “Reviews,” “Proceedings Papers,” “Meeting Abstracts,” “Letters” and more. In this paper, “Articles” and “Reviews” rely solely on the classification by WoS, which uses not only publisher information but also the occurrence of keywords in the title, abstract or introduction of the article (Clarivate, 2025a). WoS uses several schemes to classify “Publications,” not individual “Documents,” including “WoS Category” and “Research Area.” The present study uses “WoS Category” as a starting point for a simplified research area classification based on Milosevic (2020). Finally, interdisciplinary will be used broadly to refer to any publication with a library-affiliated author that is not published in an ISLS journal. The rationale for this is that it is more descriptive than non-ISLS and reflects the likelihood that a library-affiliated author brings their expertise to research in another discipline.

Library Selection Criteria

Twelve academic libraries were selected for this study. Selection criteria included the following:

1. Membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU).
2. Librarians may have faculty status with tenure.
3. Public university.

These criteria were adopted to focus on libraries with similar pressures to publish and to have a manageable sample size. The selected libraries include Indiana University, The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), Purdue University (Purdue), Rutgers University (Rutgers), Stony Brook University, University at Buffalo, The University of Arizona (Arizona), University of Colorado–Boulder (UC-Boulder), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), University of Maryland (Maryland), and The University of Utah.

AAU can be specific as to which campuses are AAU members, but there are exceptions in terms of reporting. For example, data for Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis are reported through Indiana University Bloomington. A similar situation exists for University of Maryland for the College Park and Baltimore campuses (Association of American Universities, 2025). Accordingly, this study used an inclusive strategy with respect to campuses, especially when there was evidence that the libraries’ organization spanned multiple campuses. For example, Rutgers included three campuses as this reflects the organization of the library. For Penn State, the study was limited to the State College and Hershey campuses because there are more than 20 regional campuses that could skew the results for Penn State. Of the libraries selected, only Purdue, UC-Boulder, and UIUC do not have a medical school. The goal of our selection strategy was to choose a sample that was representative of academic librarians that are most likely to engage in a broad range of research.

Database Search

The Web of Science Core Collection All Editions (SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, AHCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, ESCI, CCR-EXPANDED, and IC) was searched in June of 2024 for “Publication Date” of 1/1/2009 to 12/31/2023. WoS was selected because this data is used by InCites and AAU to measure research productivity and quality. The time span of 15 years was chosen so that the study would have enough data to reveal trends over time, while also maintaining a manageable sample size. Additional details for the bibliometric data are available from WoS (Clarivate, 2025b).

The search strategy included three search types: by address, by author, and by ORCID iD each also linked to the general address for the parent university, including campus or city, as necessary. The first search was based on “Address” to discover publications from specific libraries, using a search string the included “library” or “libraries,” university name and location such as city or campus (see Table 1). Full bibliometric records were downloaded as tab-delimited text files and imported into R. The addresses for all documents were extracted from the “Author Address” field of the records and analyzed to refine the address pattern. For some libraries, it was necessary to include other patterns (e.g., Purdue University Library includes a School of Information Studies). For other libraries, especially those where the parent institution has a separate library science unit, it was necessary to develop patterns that would remove specific addresses (e.g., Indiana University has a Department of Information and Library Science).

Once refined, author names were extracted from the “Author Address” field of the bibliometric record. Many authors have multiple name variants (bylines) depending on the use of middle name, initials, nicknames, or variations in the last name. Bylines were tagged as having full author status if the last name and either the first or middle name is spelled out. Bylines that only included first or middle initials were excluded from later searches because they were too ambiguous and retrieved off-target results.

The author bylines were used to extract ORCID iDs from the records. Names with multiple matches to ORCID iDs were checked on the ORCID website and incorrect matches were dropped. If all matches to ORCID were incorrect, the author’s name was still retained for the “author” search.

Separate “Author” and “Author Identifier” searches were created with custom R scripts, with the general forms shown in Table 1. Importantly, the pattern “library OR libraries” was dropped from the searches so that documents by a librarian that lacked specificity in the published address could be discovered.

The “Address,” “Author” and “Author Identifier” results were imported into R and combined. Many documents were retrieved by all three searches, but it was also common for documents to be retrieved by only one or two searches. These documents were subjected to two levels of manual curation, the first to reveal nonlibrarian authors and the second to reveal publications by a librarian author that was not affiliated with the library at the time of publication.

Nonlibrarian authors can accidentally receive a library address when collaborating with librarians on published research. To identify this issue, all addresses for each author were extracted and tabulated. When an author frequently (more than one-third of the time) used addresses lacking “library” or “libraries,” the author affiliations were confirmed by searching library websites, ORCID, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other websites. Authors not affiliated with the institution’s library were removed from the author list. This removed all papers for that author that do not also have a librarian author.

The second level of manual curation was to discover publications by confirmed librarian authors published when they were not affiliated with a library. This can happen, for example, when an author receives their degree from their parent institution prior to joining the library, or when a graduate student collaborates with a librarian. Each publication that lacks a “library” address pattern was manually examined to determine the author affiliation, and publications with only affiliations to a nonlibrary department were removed.

Data Analysis

All data manipulation, statistical analyses and figures were generated with the R language for statistical computing (R Core Team, 2023) with tidyverse (Wickham, 2017) packages installed. Color palettes from the package ggsci (Xiao, 2023) were used in the figures.

Results and Discussion

Addresses and Authors

The searches discovered 1,040 library-associated authors using 1,275 author name variations. The complete data for authors are shared on Open Science Framework (OSF) as Supplemental File 1 (https://osf.io/8u6bz/files/r4nxm). Bylines often varied not only in the use of middle initials, but also due to other issues, such as misspellings, hyphenations, or the use of nicknames. This result showed one advantage of searching by address rather than author name as it would be difficult to create all bylines for an author given the possible variations and misspellings that can occur.

For 798 authors, no ORCID iD was extracted from the WoS records. While this appears to indicate that less than a third of library authors use or have an ORCID iD, this low adoption of ORCID may also reflect the fact that ORCID was only established in 2012, and that some journals still do not require authors to use it.

No attempt was made to determine if authors had faculty status because the purpose of this study was to include publications for all authors affiliated with the library. Observed employee categories include faculty, professional staff, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral associates.

Academic Librarians Scholarly Output Encompasses Many Document Types

The searches discovered more than 3,500 documents for the 12 libraries. Select bibliometric data are shared on OSF as Supplemental File 2 (https://osf.io/8u6bz/files/fuvwm). WoS indexes many “Publication” and “Document Types” including “Journals,” “Books,” “Conferences,” “Articles,” “Reviews,” and “Proceeding Papers” (Clarivate, 2025a). In addition, “Editorial Material,” “Letters,” “Book Reviews,” “Database Reviews,” “Software Reviews” and similar documents are indexed. In general, research documents, such as “Articles,” “Reviews,” or “Proceeding Papers,” are peer-reviewed while the other material is not. No attempt was made to determine peer review status of individual documents because a broad overview of academic librarians’ scholarly output necessitates including all documents.

To reveal patterns across the libraries, we developed a simplified “Document Type” scheme (see Table 2). The simplified “Document Types” were tabulated for each library and visualized as a proportional bar plot to make it easier to discern how each library balances its scholarly efforts (see Figure 1). The actual document count is shown as a number when space permits. Six of the 12 libraries had articles as the majority (50% or greater) of their scholarly output. Libraries at institutions that have a medical school tended to have a higher percentage of reviews with both Arizona and Maryland leading the libraries. Rutgers, UIUC, Ohio State, University at Buffalo, and Penn State have 25% or more of their scholarly output as resource reviews.

The observed patterns may reflect the priorities of the libraries or choices of individual librarians. Libraries with a high percentage of articles and reviews likely place stronger emphasis on research for the purposes of librarian tenure and promotion. Other factors that might contribute to this include collaboration with students or faculty in other disciplines and increased support by area specialists within the library. Libraries with a higher percentage of resource reviews may place more emphasis on service and engagement with librarianship.

Number of Authors for a Library Is a Predictor Variable for Number of Documents

The libraries differed in terms of the total number of publications indexed in WoS. An obvious explanation is that the staffing levels of the libraries differed. Rather than rely on external data to normalize the results, the hypothesis that the number of authors for a library was a predictor variable for the number of publications was tested. Both the author count and publication count relied only on WoS data. Two simple linear regressions were performed.