A temporally dynamic examination of research method usage in the Chinese library and information science community
Introduction
The identity and position of library and information science (LIS) in the broader research community have been an ongoing research topic since the mid-20th century [1]. It has been commonly agreed that information science is a highly interdisciplinary field, if not a meta-field [2, 3, 4], which indicates that research approaches and methods in LIS may have different disciplinary origins [5], and that the boundaries between LIS and other neighboring communities have been constantly evolving. This is one source of the anxieties, voiced since the beginning of the 21st century, that LIS may lose its independent status or even vanish altogether [6, 7]. In light of these concerns, it is important to systematically evaluate the theoretical and methodological frameworks of LIS scholarship.
The present study aims specifically to outline how research methods have been used by Chinese LIS researchers over time, a topic that will greatly contribute to ongoing conversations about the position of LIS in the research ecosystem. As an important research community with clear geographical and language boundaries, the Chinese LIS community has been extensively studied using various scientometric methods [8, 9, 10]. However, the present effort to delineate the research methods used in this community will shed fresh light on its developments and enrich the global history of this research domain. In particular, by analyzing how methods are used by different generations of researchers, we strive to illustrate, in a more dynamic and granular manner, the evolution of research methods in this community.
What a research method is has been a contentious question over the centuries, for a few major reasons: first, the boundaries between research methods and related objects—especially theories, methodologies, and research techniques—can be very blurry. As the middle ground between theory and data [11, 12], research methods inevitably exhibit an ontological overlap with all these other objects. Second, the concept of a research method is itself highly diverse in terms of its definition and connotation. For instance, there is no clear consensus as to what should be counted or not counted as a research method: numerous theoretical and empirical works [13, 14] have been published to propose and discuss the classification of research methods, especially in LIS.
The present research takes as its starting point the definition of scientific method offered in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses” [15]. This definition has a strong focus on the principles, values, and justification of research methods, a central characteristic of methodologies in existing literature [11]. Consequently, we do not attempt to distinguish methods from methodologies in LIS research in the present investigation.
In this study, we examine how research methods are used as an indication of the existence of paradigms, in the broadest sense of the term1, in the Chinese LIS community. It has been famously pointed out that no unambiguous definition of the concept of “paradigm” was offered in Thomas Kuhn's landmark work [18]. However, a common consensus holds that a paradigm is an incommensurable set of norms about doing science, of which norms about scientific methods are an indispensable part [19]. Given this clear connection between the use of research methods and the existence of research paradigms or overall styles, we hypothesized that we might use the pattern of method usage in publications to identify such paradigms and observe their emergence and evolution between different generations of researchers over time.
To fulfil the goal of this research, we expanded an established classification system for LIS research methods and applied it to 2,421 Chinese-language research articles written by 53 prominent LIS researchers in China. Two research questions are specifically pursued:
(1) What research methods have been used in information science studies during the past four decades? With this question, we aim to offer a survey of research methods covered by our paper sample in order to illustrate the methodological landscape of Chinese LIS scholarship. Based on the modified coding scheme, we used manual coding to identify and classify research methods from all sampled publications. The results serve as the foundation of the present study and an important baseline scheme for any future research pursuing a similar topic.
(2) How are research methods used by different age groups of Chinese LIS researchers over time? Based on our classification, we further investigated how research methods are used over time. Two levels of temporality are examined: the generation of researchers based on their age, and the publication year of research outputs. Based on these two temporal scales, we are able to show how research methods are used in Chinese-language LIS publications from a more dynamic perspective.
This research offers an important contribution to quantitative science studies by integrating considerations of temporality with empirical studies on research methods. Our results show a significant shift in how methods are used by Chinese LIS researchers over the past decades: quantitative methods have been increasingly used, a trend partly driven by the emergence of new generations of LIS researchers. Our results stand in direct contrast to case studies based on other countries and greatly complement the history of LIS from an international perspective, informing the future of this field.
Section snippets
Literature Review
The research methods involved in LIS have received notable attention from scholars in information science and quantitative science studies. The present study specifically contributes to a line of research that focuses on using the content analysis method to identify and classify research methods used and described in scientific publications.
One of the earliest works in this regard is that of Peritz, who listed 11 research methodologies [20]. However, this line of research became considerably
Data Collection and Sampling Strategy
The overall process of data collection is illustrated in Fig. 1, whose major steps are discussed below. We used this specific approach because we aim to examine a representative sample of key researchers in the Chinese LIS community, and review papers are the best source of such information.
STEP 1: Identifying researchers from review papers. The first step is to identify key researchers from literature reviews of Chinese LIS scholarship. In this step, we identified seven important
Research method usage overview
Table 3 summarizes the distribution of methods and analytical approaches across the paper sample. The most commonly used research methods include theoretical approach (49.38%), scan (10.19%), bibliometrics (7.81%) and system & software analysis/design (6.52%). This distribution differs significantly from that found in previous work. In Spanish journals, for instance, the most commonly used category of method was “descriptive research,” which falls under “opinion papers” in the rubric of our
Discussion and Conclusions
Research methods play key roles in every research area, yet we have very limited knowledge of how research methods are adopted in LIS communities. To address this gap, we manually coded the research methods used in more than 2,000 articles from a sample of 53 key LIS researchers in China to understand how these research methods are used in China and to identify usage trends across time and researcher age.
We found that qualitative analysis has contributed a large proportion of publications in
Acknowledgements
This research is funded by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2020ECNU-HWFW002), the Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Advanced Theory and Application in Statistics and Data Science (East China Normal University), Ministry of Education of China (KLATASDS-FEM2004), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019T12035).
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