Abstract:
Purpose – The purpose of this scientometric study was to conduct an analysis of the research
productivity and scholarly impact of academic librarians in Tanzania for a period of 30 years from 1984
to 2013.
Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained using the Publish or Perish software which
uses Google Scholar to retrieve scholars’ publications, citations and related metrics. For each librarian,
the retrieved metrics were the number of papers, papers per author, citation counts, average citations
per paper, average papers per author, average citations per year, average citations per author and four
indices, namely, the h-index, g-index, Hc-index and the HI-norm.
Findings – The study ndings indicate that 434 publications were recorded for all librarians, giving
an average of 14.5 publications per year. The year 2008 had the most (9.9 per cent) publications followed
by 2010 (7.8 per cent), while the years 1985 and 1987 had the lowest (0.2 per cent) number of publications.
About 43 per cent of the publications were single-authored and the degree of collaboration was 0.57. The
top-ten ranked librarians contributed more than half (53.2 per cent) of all publications, although they
showed considerable variation among different metrics. Only three journal articles had 25 or more
citations.
Originality/value – Previous studies on the topic are scarce, and, therefore, this paper provides useful
recommendations to library and information science (LIS) schools, libraries and universities to improve
research productivity of their academic librarians in Tanzania and other countries with a similar
setting.
