Abstract

This study aims to investigate the scholarly contributions and web visibility of LIS educators in Nigeria through citation analysis using Google Scholar. The study analyzed the scholarly contributions of LIS educators and ranks them according to their performance. The study confined its scope to present LIS educators working in LIS schools in Nigeria. Scholarly contributions and web visibility of LIS educators was carried out by counting the number of articles published, number of citations received, h-index, and i10 index. Data was collected using Google Scholar database because of its comprehensiveness in scholarly literature. The collected data were analyzed and results reported with appropriate inferences. The findings show that a total of 379 LIS educators were found to have web visibility and contributed about 6,172 articles/research papers on the Internet. The findings also show that LIS educators have 35,263 citation counts from the 6,172 published papers. The study also examines the h-index raking of the educators; the study found that five of the most productive LIS educators comes from the University of Ilorin, Delta State University, Abraka, University of Nigeria, Nskuka, Enugu, Babcock University, University of Ibadan, Bayero University Kano and ABU Zaria were the most productive LIS Educators base on the Impact of H-index and i10-index. The study concludes by stating that LIS educators were largely cited in scholarly publications. While on the other hand, some articles had not obtained any citations at all. This could be because their choice of study areas was not of current interest. Generally, it was observed that some LIS educators had only a few journal articles online and yet had more citations than LIS educators who had several journal publications visible online. Thus, a higher number of journals found online for LIS educators did not necessarily reflect a higher number of citations.