Critical thinking in library and information science: a bibliometric analysis
Keywords:
Critical thinking, Library and information science, library instruction, bibliometric analysis, information literacyAbstract
Critical thinking has long been an important topic in academia and educational sciences. Despite various researches in analyzing critical thinking publications in different academic disciplines, no comprehensive research has ever been conducted about bibliometric analysis of publications in this topic in Library and information science (LIS). Bibliometric analysis is a significant tool for a systematic analysis of references related to multiple subjects and disciplines. This research aimed at discussing and defining critical thinking concept in LIS by implementing bibliometric analysis for analyzing and reviewing over publications regarding critical thinking in Library and information science via Web of Science Database (WoS). After standard searching, selecting and screening the relevant results, 105 publications were retrieved from WoS. Publications were analyzed according to number of references and citations per year, key authors, highly cited publications, affiliations, and countries. The frequency of related keywords and the relationship between them were also analyzed by VOSviewer to identify the relationship between keywords in critical thinking in LIS. The results demonstrated that critical thinking, information literacy and library instruction were among the most frequent keywords utilized in different publications and had the strong relationship with each other.
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