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The purpose of this paper is to discuss how theories of social and intellectual development of scientific fields can be used to analyze LIS, and especially its relationship to other research areas and the library and information field of practice. Scientific fields can be seen as reputational work organizations, where degrees of task uncertainty and mutual dependency control the coordination and direction of the fields through allocation of rewards. Through the concepts of reputational autonomy, control over resources, and structure of audiences, four aspects of scientific work have been identified as a basis for an empirical analysis of LIS: definitions of the field, institutional structure, research work, and communication structures. The preliminary analysis shows large mutual dependency between LIS research and the field of practice, while LIS in the context of Academia is dependent on other fields of research, but is still relatively isolated. The results of the paper indicate that the theories proposed are useful tools for analyzing contextual factors in the development of fields of research.