The most influential researchers in information behaviour: An integrative view on influence indicators

The purpose of this paper is to identify the top researchers in information behaviour (IB) based on ideational and social influence indicators.

The population included papers on IB indexed in the Web of Science from 1980 to 2015. UCINET and Bibexcel were the tools used for measuring the ideational and social influence indicators. The correlations among the study variables were measured by applying SPSS and LISREL.

There was a significant relationship between IB researchers’ productivity and performance, and between ideational influence and social influence. The structural equation modelling showed that a researcher with top placement in his/her co-authorship network can gain higher ideational influence. In total, it seems that the single and traditional criteria are increasingly replacing new and integrative ones in measuring researchers’ scientific influence in fields including IB studies. Results have shown that based on total scores of the studied indicators, Spink, A., Nicholas, D., Ford, N., Huntington, P., Wilson, T.D., and Jamali, H.R. gained the high scores.

The current study used an integrative method based on influence indicators to identify the influential researchers in IB studies. None of the few studies done using bibliometric methods in the realm of IB has investigated the ideational and social influence indicators altogether.