F. W. Lancaster: a bibliometric analysis

Library Trends, Spring, 2008 by Jian Qin

ABSTRACT

F. W. Lancaster, as the most cited author during the 1970s to early 1990s, has broad intellectual influence in many fields of research in library and information science. This bibliometric study collected citation data for Lancaster's publications from 1972 to 2006 and analyzed the data in terms of the time and space and disciplinary breadth of his intellectual influence. The result shows that Lancaster has established an extraordinary record of both productivity and citedness. Six of his works, according to the criteria for citation classic, have been cited so extensively over a longtime span that they qualify as citation classics in library and information science. Although much of the citation data, especially those in non-English publications, are not covered in citation databases, the bibliometric depiction nonetheless provides a good picture of Lancaster's contribution to and influence in library and information science.

**********

Evaluating scholarly communication by bibliometric analysis is one area in which F. W. Lancaster has made significant contribution. Many of his articles in bibliometric research have been cited extensively. I first read Lancaster's bibliometric articles at the beginning of my doctoral study at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Wrestling with a wide range of topics and readings for the famous four seminars (1) in the first two years of my doctoral study, my interest was drawn to bibliometric research due to my participation in the citation analysis project for the Transactions of the Royal Society of London, in which Bryce Allen was the principle investigator and Lancaster the advisor. Later in Lancaster's seminar on information retrieval and evaluation, I had numerous discussions with him about the short papers we had to complete for the course, which greatly influenced my decision on conducting a bibliometric study of interdisciplinary collaboration in science as my dissertation research. It is the most appropriate tribute, therefore, for me to use a bibliometric analysis to document Lancaster's prolific scholarly record and intellectual influence for this Festschrift.

Drawing a complete bibliometric picture for Lancaster's work, however, has proved to be challenging. Even though citations as a measure of the impact and quality of scholarly work has been in use since the early 1960s (Cole, 2000), most published citation analysis for evaluation purposes has been conducted for research fields or for institutions, the results of which were often used to rank research institutions and sometimes individual scholars. Rarely seen is using citations to show an individual's intellectual impact and influence through his/her work. While citation measure for research impact and quality has pitfalls, as many researchers have pointed out (see Meho & Spurgin, 2005 for a detailed review), it has gained wide acceptance in evaluating institutions' research performance as well as in providing evidence for academic tenure and promotion decisions. Unlike previous studies that use citations to measure and rank research productivity, this bibliometric analysis attempts to describe Lancaster's intellectual influences through citations to his work. It means that the focus will be on the breadth and depth of citations to Lancaster's work, rather than evaluating the research productivity and rank, which would allow this analysis to avoid some of the pitfalls in using citations as a measure for research productivity and impact.

Another challenge is the limit on citation data coverage. As a prolific scholar, Lancaster has maintained a highly productive academic career for over forty years, starting as early as 1963 when his first paper was published. His work includes a wide variety of types--books, book chapters, reports, papers, and journal articles--and covers several broad research fields in evaluation and measurement, information representation and retrieval, scholarly communication, and technology and management. (Table 1). To present a bird's-eye-view of Lancaster's research over the forty years in all areas, I tallied all publications in each type listed in his curriculum vitae into four broad subject categories. Each paper included in Table 1 was assigned to only one of the four categories, which was based on the dominant topic of the article, despite the fact that many of Lancaster's publications cover more than one category. Among all the publications, almost half of them are papers and journal articles, many of which were published in prestigious journals, for example, science journals such as New Scientist and Nature, and medical journals such as Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and Postgraduate Medicine. The book publishing record has also been extraordinary: fifteen in total over a forty-year career--almost one book in every two and half years, not counting the multiple editions for several of them.

Since the citation databases include publications starting only from 1972, those citations to Lancaster's work prior to 1972 are not included in the databases. This caused a loss of some important citation data, such as those to Lancaster's research report on the evaluation of MEDLARS published in 1968, one of the most cited publications by Lancaster, as well as those in information retrieval literature at the time.