The Epistemic Communities and Evolution of Knowledge Domains A Domain Analysis of the Journal Education for Information

Abstract

Bibliometrics has been presented as one of the approaches to domain analysis. In this context, the relationship between domain analysis and journals has also been explored. There have been several bibliometric studies of specific journals using a domain-analytic approach, often published in ISKO venues, such as those carried out on the journal Knowledge Organization, and the Spanish KO-specific journal Scire. These domain analyses helped to determine the relevance and interest of these journals for the KO and other communities. We propose to study the epistemic communities around the journal Education of Information. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Information Studies. One of the assumptions of our research is that the domain of a given journal is delineated by its epistemic communities. We performed simple bibliometric counts on authors' affiliations and number of co-authorships in order to identify research elites across the seven periods covering the existence of the journal (1983-2018). We then mapped the co-authorship networks of the journal in order to visualise how its epistemic communities emerged and changed during that time.