Authorship as a measure of the productivity of schools of library and information science

Rankings of schools of library and information science (LIS) by various measures of author productivity are consistent. The presence of a doctoral program, of an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) library, and the fact that a school exists in a Carnegie I research university all are related to a high author-productivity ranking. The presence of a certificate program is not. The faculty designated as full-time in fifty-seven schools listed in the 1992-93 Journal of Education for Library and Information Science directory issue were searched online in the Library Literature database on Wilsonline. The search results included the sum of the postings in Library Literature for each of the full-time faculty in a school, total authorships (excluding book reviews) for the school, the number of book reviews produced by the school, and the count of the union of the posting sets for each of the full-time faculty reflecting the number of unique items credited to authors in the school. Each of these counts was also normalized by the number of full-time faculty. The measures utilized reflect a limited time period, do not account for publication outside traditional library literature, and are but one of several suggested quantitative indications of school productivity.