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1. Introduction
Data science, having emerged in response to the increased amount of data, has received considerable attention in recent years. For example, the Web of Science database has recorded 2,350 publications in the topic area “data science” in the period 1980–2019 by April 2019. And, 44.8% of publications came from the subject area of computer science, followed by engineering (18.2%), mathematics (7.4%), science technology and other topics (5.6%), business economic (4.6%), education and educational research (3.6%), information science and library science (3.4%), physics (2.9%), telecommunications (2.9%), medical informatics (2.7%), materials science (2.6%) and operations research and management science (2.6%) (Virkus and Garoufallou, 2019a). At 3.4%, the library and information science (LIS) contribution to data science in the period 1980–2019 was limited.
This paper presents the results of the study that explored the field of data science from the LIS perspective using content analysis. The structure of this paper is as follows: section 2 describes the research methodology, section 3 presents the results of the content analysis on the data science from the LIS perspective, section 4 draws conclusions.
2. Methodology
This paper presents the research results that are a part of the study that explored the data science from the LIS perspective. The following research questions were proposed: (1) what are the main tendencies in publication years, document types, countries of origin, source titles, authors of publications, affiliations of the article authors and the most cited articles related to data science in the field of LIS? (2) What are the main themes discussed in the publications from the LIS perspective?
In the first stage, the bibliographic analysis was made on the basis of papers published in the Web of Science database. Searches were carried out in the database by topic in April 2019 using the term “data science”. The search strategy discovered 80 publications published from 1980–2019. A statistical descriptive analysis of these papers provided answers to the first research question and was presented by Virkus and Garoufallou (2019a). The methodology and research approach were also tested in another paper by Virkus and Garoufallou (2019b), which dealt with data science from a perspective of computer science.
In the second stage the content analysis of 80 publications was made to answer the second research question:...