# Research Method Usage across Academic Ages in Library and Information Science: An Empirical Study (1990-2023)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21862 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21862/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Quantifying patterns of research interest evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03319/) (2017)
- [A Review on Method Entities in the Academic Literature: Extraction, Evaluation, and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03687/) (2022)
- [Using Full-text Content of Academic Articles to Build a Methodology Taxonomy of Information Science in China](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07924/) (2021)
- [The relationship between scientists' research performance and the degree of internationalization of their research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01776/) (2018)
- [Academic vs. Biological Age in Research on Academic Careers: A Large-scale Study with Implications for Scientifically Developing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04477/) (2021)
- [Evolution of Research Method Usage Across the Academic Careers of Library and Information Science Scholars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20528/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Academic age critically shapes career development, influencing research behavior, output volume, and methodological choices. Analyzing method variation across academic ages offers a new theoretical lens on scholarly evolution and provides early-career researchers with practical guidance for method selection. A corpus of 26,677 articles published 1990-2023 in 14 authoritative Library and Information Science journals was compiled. The CogFT model automatically classified the research methods embedded in these articles, and Top2Vec generated the topic model. This process resulted in a comprehensive dataset linking research methods with topics. Author-name disambiguation enabled calculation of each scholar's academic age. Popularity and Shannon diversity indices for methods, together with topic diversity, were compared across academic age groups. Results reveal dynamic methodological trends: the share of theoretical approaches declined gradually, whereas experimental and bibliometric methods gained ground. Method popularity differs significantly among cohorts. Mid-career scholars exhibit the highest method diversity; late-career scholars the lowest.