Special Librarianship Research: We're Number 32!

The July / August issue of Information Outlook has a list of U.S. universities ranked by number of articles published in 2000 - 2010 for subject specialist librarians. To create the list, Amy Hardin and Tony Stankus counted the number of substantial articles librarians had published in fourteen journals. The fourteen journals were in special librarianship areas such as medicine, law and music.

I already knew that SIUC would be on the list. SIUC comes in at number thirty-two with twenty articles. A lot of the credit for this rank goes to the librarians at the law school for publishing in law journals. There's also plenty of credit to go around at Morris Library. Mary Taylor was a coauthor of four articles in medical librarianship journals. Cassie Wagner, Beth Cox, Andrea Imre and I were authors or coauthors of two articles each in special librarianship journals. Jonathan Nabe, Melissa Hubbard, and Ann Myers also have written articles in these journals.

Research from Morris Library: We're Grrreat ... or at Least Pretty Good

On June 13, SIU was honored at the SLA conference. SIU is one of the top 50 university libraries for research productivity in special librarianship.

From the email announcement that I got from Tony Stankus, "...we are announcing the roll call of honor of the top 50 universities which  contributed the most papers to the literature of special librarianship from 2000-2010, based on an analysis of the author affiliations of over 2,000 papers of substantive research or professional commentary in the eleven most cited journals in these areas, using procedures adapted from Wiberley, Hurd & Weller (College & Research Libraries 46(4): 334-342; 2006)
       Using the US News & World Report listings of over 1400 institutions of higher education as our baseline,  we calculate that your presence on the top 50 list places you in the highest 4% of the country in terms of scholarly productivity in this area, something I am sure would not greatly surprise you."

I missed the award ceremony, so I don't know where in the top fifty we fell. In other rankings of research in library and information science, SIU hasn't made it to the top ten for published articles but made it to the top ten for conference presentations.

I would quibble with the statement that being in the top 50 puts us in the highest 4% of scholarly productivity. The 1400 institutions in the US News listings include about a thousand colleges and universities no publications. Nevertheless, even being in the top quarter says something about the faculty in Library Affairs.