Dr. Zhao Organized and Presented at an ASIS&T Panel on "Bibliometrics and LIS Education"

Dr. Zhao organized and presented at a panel on "Bibliometrics and LIS Education" on Oct. 11, 2011 at the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting 2011 in New Orleans. This panel of LIS educators and researchers from Asia, Canada, Europe and the United States discussed an interesting phenomenon in the field of LIS in North America: Bibliometrics is quite strong in LIS research but very weak in LIS education. As the panelists pointed out, Bibliometrics, the quantitative analysis of various facets of scholarly publications such as subjects, citations, authors and their institutional affiliations, has great value for library collection management, reference work, and information retrieval; library information specialists can also assemble high-quality bibliometric data to assist in faculty evaluations in tenure and promotion cases, evaluations of research units within a university, accreditation of educational programs, inter-departmental or inter-institutional research proposals, curriculum planning, and detection of research trends. However, the interest from LIS students in Bibliometrics related courses is currently low in North America partly due to its perceived low relevance to LIS jobs and high requirements for math. Bibliometrics related content is currently taught as part of other LIS courses in North America, but courses devoted to bibliometrics are also taught in Asia and Europe.