Research on the Salient Subjects and Their Developing Trends of Foreign Library and Information Science Journals
国外图书情报类期刊热点主题及发展趋势研究

This paper utilizes the Self-Organizing Map(SOM) to analyze the salient subjects among 60 foreign journals in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) and the development trends of Journal of Information Science (JIS) from 1981 to 2007. An enhanced SOM display method named Attribute Accumulative Matrix is employed to identify 7 groups of salient subjects among the 60 investigated journals. A novel SOM display method named Prevalent Attribute Projection is constructed combined with U-matrix, to analyze the development process and patterns of JIS’ salient subjects in the past 27 years. The research findings reflect the development laws of foreign LIS journals to some extent,and the research methods can provide systematic tool and procedure for the analysis of salient subjects and their development trends among journals.