Characterizing Award-Winning Papers in Library and Information Science (LIS): A Case Study of LIS Journals Published by Emerald Publishing

This paper explores the characteristics of 106 award-winning papers from the Library and Information Science (LIS) journals published by Emerald Publishing between 2008 and 2019, focusing on collaboration type, paper type, topic, and citation count to illustrate the developmental trends of LIS scholarship. The findings show that the top three topics of the award-winning papers were information service activities, professions and information institutions, and user studies. More than half of the award-winning papers were written by teams, among which inter-institutional collaboration and intradepartmental collaboration accounted for the largest proportion, while interdepartmental collaboration within an institution accounted for the smallest proportion. There were 65 empirical research papers in the sample, among which qualitative studies were dominant, followed by quantitative research and mixed methods research. The award-winning papers had a higher mean and median in citation counts than the average papers concurrently published by the journals. The research results provide implications for researchers and can help them understand the trends in research topics and common analytical types in LIS for their future studies.