Subject and authorship trends: a content analysis of New Zealand Libraries and The New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal, 1937-2009

Abstract

As New Zealand’s longest running professional library journal, New Zealand Libraries (NZL) (later renamed The New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal (NZLIMJ)) has been part of the development of libraries and librarianship in this country for more than 70 years. No analysis of the first 70 years of NZL has been done to consider its content in terms of subject and authorship. The aim of this research was to identify the popularity of subjects and authorship characteristics found within NZL from 1937-2009, to determine the extent to which the future was discussed by authors in their articles, and to determine how changes to the stated purpose of NZL was reflected by changes to the content of the journal. All issues of NZL from 1937-2009 were analysed using content analysis. A prevalidated classification scheme was used as the basis for the coding. Subjects falling into the Applied/Operations subject category comprised the highest volume of the journal’s subject content in each decade analysed. Individual subjects were discussed if they showed significant changes in popularity over time. Authorship characteristics of gender, occupation, and institutional affiliation were analysed and showed changing trends in each of these areas over the seventy years. Author productivity was assessed based on all articles used for the analysis and the results were consistent with previous research. As the stated purpose of NZL/NZLIMJ changed over the decades, this was reflected in the content of articles being published.