Disability and Library Services: Global Research Trend

TL;DR

This study analyzes global research trends on disability and library services from 1991 to 2021, highlighting growth patterns, key contributors, and the need for more research in developing countries.

Contribution

It provides a bibliometric and text mining analysis of literature in this field, revealing publication trends, core journals, and geographic distribution of research.

Findings

Significant growth in publications since 2000

Research predominantly from developed countries

Developing countries need to increase research efforts

Abstract

The research on differently abled persons, and their use of library is getting global attention in recent years. The field has shown a modest, continuous but wide-scale growth. This research paper aimed at capturing the dynamics of the field using various bibliometrics and text mining tools. The bibliographic data of journal articles published in the field were collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The records were collected form the year 1991 to 2021 and analysed to observed the trends of literature growth, core journals, institutes from where most of the literature is being published, prominent keywords and so on. The results show that there is a significant growth of publications since the year 2000. The trends shows that the research in these areas is mostly emerging from developed countries. The developing countries should also pay more attention to do research in this area because differently abled peoples need in developed countries may vary with respect to developed countries.