Scope of Freely Available Information Resources in Peer-Reviewed Articles Published in Library and Information Sciences

Abstract

Freely available information resources, which can be accessed freely and without paying any price on the Web, are increasing their effect in the scientific communication process day by day. It is extremely important to observe how and at what level this effect occurs in this study. It is aimed to determine concretely the ideal contribution of them to the field of Library and Information Sciences (LIS). Citation analysis of 4384 references in the bibliography of 99 (47 BD, 52 TK; 11 English, 88 Turkish) peer-reviewed articles published in the five-year period covering the years 2015-2019 of Information World and Turkish Librarianship journals, which continue their publishing activities in the field of LIS, has been carried out. In this study, the availability of each resource on the Web was searched through Google and Google Scholar. Findings are presented with descriptive statistics and visualization. In the context of the citation analysis carried out, it was determined that 65% of the resources were accessed as freely available. Based on the findings, the most “articles”, “other resources” and “meeting resources” were accessed as freely in the context of the relevant data set; “legal sources”, “books” and “reports” were determined as the least accessed sources, respectively. It has been found that the total and freely available information resources in the citations are mostly in English, followed by Turkish. As a result, it has been revealed that there is a dependent relationship between freely available status and journals, years, and types of information resources. The original aspect of the study is that it tried to present the possible contribution of free access to the scientific communication process by comprehensively categorizing the sources used in refereed articles in two peer-reviewed journals that adopted open access publication life in the national literature in terms of freely availability in terms of types of information resources and languages. Since this research ideally tries to reveal the contribution of freely available information resources to scientific communication in the context of this sample, it is recommended to carry out comparative studies that determine the contribution of both the libraries and freely available information resources to scientific communication process with a national and larger sample to complete this research in the future.