Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore the characteristics of the literature on information literacy, such as document type, publication country, language, literature growth and author productivity. The distribution of journal articles and core journals were examined by Bradford’s law and Bradford-Zipf’s law. The results of this study reveal that 1. periodical is the major document type; more than 66% literature were published by United States and Great Britain; English is the most frequently used language; 2. the literature growth rate is in a steadily up-growing trend since middle 90’s; 3. the zone analysis and graphical formulation from Bradford’s law and Bradford-Zipf’s law are examined and both are applicable to journal productivity distribution; 4. the quality of the core journal is better than the others; 5. 15 core journals are identified by the Bradford’s law and how long these journals has issued does not absolutely affect the journal productivity; 6. the core journals are research periodical primarily, most of them deal with academic libraries, school libraries, and reference services; 7. most of the authors published one document only, however, there are no absolute correlation between author productivity and their active years; 8. the most productive authors are primarily female and university faculty and their major research fields are information literacy, bibliographic instruction and information technology.
| Keywords: | information literacy; bibliometrics; literature growth; Bradford’s law; author productivity; core journals |
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