Research productivity and citation patterns of librarians in Tanzania: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose: A scientometric study was conducted to analyze the research productivity and citation patterns of librarians in Tanzania for a period of 30 years from 1984 to 2013. Research methods: 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 total number of papers, total number of citations, average citations per paper, average papers per author, average citations per year, average citations per author, and four indices - the h-index, g-index, Hc-index, and the HI-norm. Findings: The study findings indicate that a total of 434 publications were recorded for all librarians, giving an average of 14.5 publications per year. The year 2008 had the most (9.9%) publications followed by 2010 (7.8%) while the years 1985 and 1987 had the lowest (0.2%) number of publications. About 43% 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%) of all publications although they showed considerable variation among different metrics. Only three journal articles had 25 or more citations. Librarians in Tanzania had been publishing their research findings in a wide range of international scholarly journals with the University of Dar es Salaam Library Journal being the only Tanzanian journal with a substantial number of articles. Originality: This is the most comprehensive study to be conducted in the country focusing on the research performance of librarians Research implications: The study findings call for scholars to recognize the importance of publishing in visible journals in order to receive large citation counts. These findings suggest that many factors should be considered in combination when evaluating the research performance of librarians and other scholars. Institutions are urged to employ scientometrics in evaluating the research performance of their scholars since such techniques take into account a combination of several measures.