International Research Output And Affecting Factors Of Doctorate-granting LIS Schools And Departments

Under social environment of national strategy about creating world-class university and discipline background of development of Chinese Library and Information Science(LIS),the world-class discipline will be the aim of the development of Chinese LIS.Doctorate-granting LIS'schools and departments are the main force to promote Chinese LIS to be the world-class discipline.So it's significant to study the international research output of those institutions and affecting factors of researchers' international research.The first study of this paper is to investigate international core publication research achievements of eight doctorate-granting LIS schools and departments.172 publications which represent research achievements of those institutions were collected from the database of Web of Science(SCIE,SSCI,A&HCI).With methods of bibliometric and social network analysis,the history and trends of research,features of high-quality publications,the current situation of research cooperation and research topics are explored based on these publications,from aspects of year distribution of publications,source journals,document types,subjects,funding agencies,authors,titles and abstracts.Results show that:1.The international scientific research of eight doctorate-granting LIS schools and departments is still at the initial stage with limited number of publications in international core journals,but the number obviously increased after 2005.2.About 68.02%of these papers are published in top LIS journals.A large number of these papers are published in journals with lower impact factors and lower 5-year impact factors.There are six types of these publications,of which 81.98%are journal papers.The main subjects of the publications are LIS and Computer Science,with other 20 subjects of Science and Humanistic and Social Science.The number of the funding agencies is large,and the top agencies are National Science Foundation of China,Ministry of Education of China and National Social Science Foundation of China.3.No author has published more than 10 papers in eight doctorate-granting LIS schools and departments.Just a small part of authors publish more than 3 papers.Authors who publish more than 3 papers are mainly in School of Information Management at Wuhan University,School of Information Management at Nanjing University and Department of Information Management at Beijing University.The collaborative degree of authors is 2.92,and the collaborative rate of authors is 86.63%.Collaboration among authors increases over the study period.Most of these papers are completed by three or more authors' collaboration.The collaborative degree with foreign authors is about 33.14%.Collaboration with foreign authors increases over the study period.Most of the foreign authors are from countries of the United States and Great Britain.Based on co-authorship of at least two papers,we identify 20 consolidated research groups made up of 61 authors.The co-authorship networks have a low degree of clustering.The main sub-networks are made up of "supervisors and students" and authors in the same institution.4.The research topics of these publications mainly focus on the development of LIS in China.Additionally,the main research topics also include(a)information users,libraries and related methods,(b)webometrics,including scholar communication,web link analysis,web citation analysis,web impact factors and so on,(c)science evaluation of journals,universities and researchers,and(d)technologies of information storage,retrieval and analysis,and information system integration.This study investigates individual characteristics of researchers in terms of their research self-efficacy and research outcome expectations,as well as organizational characteristics in terms of organizational climate.The influence of these characteristics on two variables,namely international research behavior and international research achievement,is also analyzed for researchers in doctorate-granting LIS institutions.Additionally,the study investigates potential relations of researcher demographic characteristics(i.e.,gender,age,years of doing research,academic rank,degree and university of graduation)with international research behavior,international research achievement and research self-efficacy.The basic theory of this study is the triadic reciprocal determinism in Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory.Methodologies of interviews and questionnaires are applied.Research procedures are as follows.First of all,on the basis of literature review,the semi-structured interviews about the international research output of researchers and the factors which affect researchers' international research output in doctorate-granting LIS' schools and departments are carried out among 12 researchers in one of the doctorate-granting LIS schools and departments.Secondly,based on the semi-structured interviewing results from the researchers,the research hypotheses of this study are put forward.Then the statistical analyses including Person's correlation coefficients or Spearman's correlation coefficients,stepwise regression,independent-samples t test and one-way analysis of variance(one-way ANOVA)are applied to test the research hypotheses among a sample of 161 faculty and doctoral graduate students those eight institutions.Findings indicate that:1.There is positive influence of international research behavior and research self-efficacy on researchers' international research achievement.The indirect influence of research self-efficacy also exists via international research behavior.2.Researchers' international research behavior is positively influenced by research self-efficacy.3.Research outcome perceptions and organizational climate have no significant correlation with the two variables of international research output(international research achievement and international research behavior).4.Research self-efficacy is positively associated with organizational climate.Research outcome perceptions are positively associated with organizational climate and research self-efficacy.5.The demographic variables of age,years of doing research,academic rank,degree and university of graduation have a significant effect on international research behavior scores and international research achievement scores.In addition,results suggest that the demographic variables of gender have a significant effect on international research behavior scores.Finally,the demographic variables of gender,age,academic rank and degree have a significant effect on research self-efficacy scores.Conclusion,practical recommendation,innovation points,limitation and suggestions for further studies are supplied.