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Mentoring by faculty advisors is closely related to the personal and professional outcomes of doctoral students. However, few researchers have examined the characteristics of faculty mentors. To deal with this lack of research, the author attempted to explore the characteristics of faculty mentors from the perspective of Library and Information Science (LIS) doctoral students in the United States. In the study, the author combined interviews and a survey to examine the characteristics of faculty mentors. The interview and survey findings present a list of characteristics that are comprehensive and specific to LIS doctoral education. Specifically, the author describes a faculty mentor as a well-rounded person who possesses both professional and interpersonal characteristics. In addition, the findings show some aspects in which the current advising/mentoring could improve. The current study offers a guideline for the accomplishment of doctoral mentoring at a concrete level, rather than vaguely recommending that faculty advisors support the professional and psychosocial development of their students. In a following paper, the author will relate background characteristics of doctoral students to their perception of mentors.

Many researchers have suggested careful application of bibliometric indicators to research evaluation because of many factors including disciplinary norms that influence the publication and citation behaviors of researchers. Although some researchers have examined different bibliometric patterns across disciplines, relatively few scholars have focused on whether research performance should be evaluated in a uniform manner across research domains within a single discipline, especially in a multi-disciplinary fields such as library and information science (LIS). In order to ascertain whether such subject-specific differences exist in the LIS field, we conducted a bibliometric study that examined the publication and citation patterns across subject areas of LIS research in Korea. The analysis of our study data, which consisted of 6,838 citations to 1,986 domestic papers published between 2001 and 2010 by 163 LIS faculty members in Korea, revealed some evidence of bibliometric pattern differences across subject areas. In particular, we found that the authors in Bibliographic Studies, who were almost twice as productive as authors in other subject areas, received the lowest citation counts, which might be attributed to their different publishing and citing behaviors. Publication and citation patterns across subject areas of LIS papers and observation of the possible effect of sub-disciplinary culture on citing behaviors suggest the need for subject-specific assessment of multidisciplinary research discipline such as LIS. In future studies, we will investigate different publication and citation behaviors of authors by subject areas.

Citation indexes are essential data sources for bibliometric analysis of research performance. However, the international coverage of popular citation indexes such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar is minimal since very few non-English publications are included in those indexes. Thus, one must look to Korean citation indexes for proper bibliometric assessment of research in Korea, rather than relying on conventional indexes that contain only a fraction of scholarly publications by Korean authors. Since the evaluative outcome of bibliometric analysis is only as reliable as the data from which they are drawn, the examination of Korean citation indexes is vital to establishing an effective approach to bibliometric analysis of research performance in Korea. The paper presents a study that investigates three key citation indexes in Korea, namely Korea Science Citation Index (KSCI), Korea Citation Index (KCI), and Korea Medical Citation Index (KoMCI). The study compares the impact factors of the jou...

We investigated how bibliometric indicators such as publication count and citation count affect the assessment ofresearch performance by computing various bibliometric scores of the works of Korean LIS faculty members andcomparing the rankings by those scores. For the study data, we used the publication and citation data of 159 tenure-track faculty members of Library and Information Science departments in 34 Korean universities. The study resultsshowed correlation between publication count and citation count for authors with many publications but the oppo-site evidence for authors with few publications. The study results suggest that as authors publish more and morework, citations to their work tend to increase along with publication count. However, for junior faculty members whohave not yet accumulated enough publications, citations to their work are of great importance in assessing theirresearch performance. The study data also showed that there are marked differences in the magnitude of citationsbetween papers published in Korean journals and papers published in international journals.

Citation analysis, in addition to peer review, is one of the popular methods to assess faculty research performance. In some disciplines, the validity of citation counts for evaluating research has been proven by many studies. However, it should be used cautiously when different disciplines are concerned, because citation practices may vary across disciplines. Although there have been studies that have examined the different citation practices across disciplines, relatively little research has investigated the citation rates of subject areas within a single discipline. This study explores the citation rates of subject areas in library and information science (LIS) in Korea. The preliminary results of this study will provide the rationale for further work, analyzing the causes of different citation patterns in a discipline. Ultimately, the study could provide useful implications for understanding and using the citation counts in assessing research performance.

Citation analysis studies have reported many problems associated with data coverage problems common to popular citation databases such as Web of Science(WoS). In addition, the studies that analyzed citation patterns of Korean publications found that up to 75% of references in Korean publications were to international publications. As a first step in investigating the international coverage of WoS database, the study investigated the effect of adding citation data from Korea Science Citation Database(KSCD) to the impact factors and journal rankings of the journals listed in Journal Citation Reports. Specifically, the study mined the reference data from top 5 Korean Library and Information Science(KLIS) journals to recompute the impact factors reported in JCR 2009. Since the resulting journal rankings did not significantly differ from JCR 2009 rankings except for minor ranking changes, we analyzed additional citation data from 45 computer science and electrical engineering journals. Although the overall ranking difference was not statistically significant, one of the ranking partitions showed significant change. Such study findings despite its limited data sample suggest the potential impact of non-Western citation databases such as KSCD to bibliometric indicators provided by popular citation databases like WoS.

This study assesses research patterns and trends of library and information science(LIS) in Korea by applying bibliometric analysis. For the study, 2,400 peer-reviewed publications from 2001 to 2010(including conference proceedings) published by 159 LIS professors in Korea were analyzed by year, author, affiliation and journal. The study findings showed an increasing trend in collaboration(52.75% of total publications with single authors and 47.25% with multiple authors) among LIS professors in Korea, robust publication patterns of Korean LIS faculty(average 1.51 publications per year), and an increasing number in foreign publications(170 publications). The study results also suggested an internationalization of LIS in Korea. Specifically, the study found a higher rate of Korean LIS faculty with foreign degrees than in previous years as well as a higher publication rate of professors with international degrees. The analysis of publication patterns conducted by the study, which is a first step in our aim to establish a multi-faceted approach for assessing the impact of scholarly work, will be followed up with analysis of references and citations to evaluate the quality of publications.

A large and reliable citation database is necessary to identify and analyze citation behavior of Korean researchers in science and technology. Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) built the Korea Science Citation Database (KSCD), and have provided Korea Science Citation Index (KSCI) and Korea Journal Citation Reports (KJCR) services. In this article, citing behavior of Korean scientists on Korean journals was examined by using the KSCD that covers 459 Korean core journals. This research dealt with (1) statistical numeric information of journals in KSCD, (2) analysis of document types cited. (3) ratio of domestic to international documents cited and ratio of citing different disciplines. (4) analysis on immediacy index, peak time, and half-life of cited documents, and (5) analysis on impact of journals based on KJCR citation indicators. From this research, we could find the immediacy citation rate (average 2.36%), peak-time (average 1.7 years) and half-life (average 5.2 years) of cited journals in Korea. We also found that the average journal self-citation rate is more than 50% in every field. In sum, citing behavior of Korean scientists on Korean journals was comprehensively identified from this research.