Social Sciences & Humanities

Library and information science research

Library and information science (LIS) studies how information is organised, found, used and preserved, and much of its research now concerns scholarly communication itself: metadata, persistent identifiers, repositories and the measurement of research. The literature is indexed in LISTA, a free EBSCO database covering 467 active journals, 397 of them peer-reviewed, and in open catalogues such as OpenAlex, whose data is released under CC0. Preprints on digital libraries go to the arXiv cs.DL category. The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) publishes JASIST, in print continuously since 1950. The Association of College & Research Libraries, the largest division of the American Library Association, publishes the bi-monthly, online-only College & Research Libraries. Bibliometrics and scientometrics have their own society, ISSI, which has held conferences biennially since 1987 and lists Quantitative Science Studies among its publications. In the US, the Institute of Museum and Library Services funds research through National Leadership Grants for Libraries and the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, whose research grants run from $75,000 to $750,000, subject to the availability of funds. Infrastructure research rests on shared standards and registries: DCMI Metadata Terms, NISO standards, Crossref DOIs and ORCID iDs, with repository practice coordinated through COAR. For any bibliometric or metadata study, record which index, snapshot date and identifier source the analysis used.

New to the field? What is Library & Information Science? →

Reviewed 5 November 2026 by CASRAI Editorial Board

Sources

JASIST (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology)(read 5 November 2026)
College & Research Libraries(read 5 November 2026)
Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)(read 5 November 2026)
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)(read 5 November 2026)
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI)(read 5 November 2026)
COAR (repository association)(read 5 November 2026)
IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries(read 5 November 2026)
IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program(read 5 November 2026)
DCMI Metadata Terms(read 5 November 2026)
NISO (National Information Standards Organization)(read 5 November 2026)
Crossref(read 5 November 2026)
ORCID(read 5 November 2026)
LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts)(read 5 November 2026)
OpenAlex(read 5 November 2026)
arXiv cs.DL (Digital Libraries)(read 5 November 2026)

Field at a glance

Journals

JASIST (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology): ASIS&T's fully refereed journal of information science and technology research, published continuously since 1950.Website ↗
College & Research Libraries: ACRL's bi-monthly, online-only scholarly research journal for academic and research librarianship.Website ↗

Societies

Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T): Professional association bridging information science practice and research; publishes JASIST, ARIST and the annual meeting proceedings.Website ↗
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL): The largest division of the American Library Association, founded in 1940, representing nearly 8,500 individuals and libraries.Website ↗
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI): Society for the quantitative study of science; biennial conferences since 1987 and Quantitative Science Studies among its publications.Website ↗ · Our guide →
COAR (repository association): International association of repositories and repository networks, with over 140 members and partners, working to harmonise repository policy and practice.Website ↗ · Our guide →

Funders and programmes

IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries: IMLS programme for replicable library and archival practice; its Applied Research Grants run $75,000 to $750,000 over one to three years.Website ↗
IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program: Workforce and faculty programme whose project types include Early Career Research Grants and Applied Research Grants of $75,000 to $750,000.Website ↗

Standards and formats

DCMI Metadata Terms: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative specification of the fifteen-element Dublin Core set plus extension vocabularies, expressed in RDF.Website ↗ · Our guide →
NISO (National Information Standards Organization): ANSI-accredited non-profit that develops information standards and recommended practices and is the US Technical Advisory Group to ISO TC 46.Website ↗
Crossref: Not-for-profit membership organisation for scholarly DOIs and metadata, with over 26,500 members from 171 countries.Website ↗ · Our guide →
ORCID: Not-for-profit registry issuing free persistent identifiers that link researchers to their contributions and affiliations.Website ↗ · Our guide →

Preprints and indexes

LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts): Free EBSCO database indexing 467 active journals, 397 of them peer-reviewed, plus books and research reports in librarianship.Website ↗
OpenAlex: Free and open catalogue of the world's scholarly research, built by a small nonprofit team, with data released under CC0.Website ↗ · Our guide →
arXiv cs.DL (Digital Libraries): arXiv category covering digital library design and document and text creation, separate from Information Retrieval.Website ↗ · Our guide →

170 pages across 8 topic areas

Scholarly Publishing

ACRL: Academic & Research Libraries Guide
A comprehensive guide to ACRL, covering its ALA division governance, open-access C&RL publishing, higher education library standards, and sections.…
ARC Open Access Policy 2026: What Changed on 1 July
Version 2026.1 of the ARC Open Access Policy took effect 1 July 2026, removing the embargo option for journal articles and conference papers and requi…
Archive-It: What It Is, Who Uses It and How to Browse Its Web Archives
Archive-It is a service built at the Internet Archive for curated, public web archives. Who uses it, how to browse it, and its limits.…
Article Processing Charges (APCs): What They Cost, Who Pays, and How to Get Them Waived
What an article processing charge (APC) actually pays for, typical price ranges across venues, who pays it (funder, institution, or author), how to bu…
ASIS&T: Information Science Platform Guide
An operational guide to ASIS&T, covering its governance, the 2025 SLA merger, JASIST research publishing, digital library search, and SIG membership t…
Boolean Search Operators for Literature Searching
How AND, OR, NOT, nesting, truncation, proximity operators, and field tags/controlled vocabulary combine to build a reproducible database search strat…
Choice Reviews: Academic Library Platform Guide
Choice Reviews is the ACRL database providing academic monograph evaluations, collection intelligence, GOBI integration, and selector workflows for re…
ChronosHub: The Open-Access and APC Management Platform Institutions Use for Compliance Tracking
What ChronosHub is, how its APC funding-request and agreement-monitoring workflow works, who uses it, and what CASRAI could and could not verify from…
CINAHL Search Strategy: Subject Headings and Nursing-Specific Filters
How to build a CINAHL search: CINAHL Headings vs. MeSH, the Explode and Major Concept toggles, MH/MM field codes, the Exclude MEDLINE Records checkbox…
CiteScore vs. Journal Impact Factor: Methodology, Windows, and Denominators ComparedComparison
CiteScore (Elsevier/Scopus) and Journal Impact Factor (Clarivate/JCR) both average citations per document, but differ in citation window (4 years vs 2…
CLIR: Council on Library & Information Resources
An expert guide to CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources): history, mission, Digital Library Federation, postdoctoral fellowship tracks,…
COUNTER 5.1.1: The New Access_Method: Agent Category for AI Usage Reporting
COUNTER Code of Practice Release 5.1.1 (30 June 2026) adds an optional Access_Method: Agent category and five new AI Metric_Types, letting publishers…
Couperin: How France's University Library Consortium Negotiates National Open-Access Deals
How Couperin negotiates national read-and-publish and transformative agreements with major academic publishers on behalf of French universities, and h…
e-ShodhSindhu: What the Consortium Covers and How It Relates to ONOS
e-ShodhSindhu is INFLIBNET's national e-resources consortium for Indian higher education, formed by merging UGC-INFONET, N-LIST and INDEST-AICTE. What…
ESAC Initiative: The Negotiation Principles and Registry Behind Global Transformative Agreements
ESAC (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges) sets the negotiation guidelines behind most transformative agreements and runs the public registry…
FinELib: Finland's National Consortium for Open-Access Publishing Agreements
FinELib is Finland's national consortium negotiating open-access and read-and-publish agreements with major academic publishers on behalf of Finnish u…
Gates Foundation Open Access Policy (2025)
The Gates Foundation's 2025 open-access policy requires immediate preprint posting, CC BY 4.0 licensing, and removes APC funding support for grantees.…
Gold vs Green vs Diamond vs Hybrid Open Access: Comparing OA ModelsComparison
Gold, green, diamond, and hybrid open access compared: who pays, embargo rules, licensing, and why hybrid OA draws 'double-dipping' criticism from fun…
HEC Recognized Journals (HJRS): W, X, Y Categories Explained
What HEC's Journal Recognition System (HJRS) is, how the W/X/Y category structure works, how journals get categorized and re-evaluated, how it drives…
How the Journal Impact Factor Is Calculated: Citable Items, Front Matter, and Self-Citation
The generic 'citations divided by citable items' formula stops short of the mechanics that actually move a journal's number: Clarivate's document-type…
How to Check a Journal's Impact Factor (JCR)
How to find a journal's current, Clarivate-sourced Impact Factor via JCR and the Web of Science Master Journal List, plus what DORA and CoARA say it c…
How to Check a Journal's Self-Archiving Policy with Open Policy Finder (Sherpa Romeo)
How to search Open Policy Finder, the tool formerly known as Sherpa Romeo, and read its version-by-version policy fields to confirm what you can self-…
How to Find a Journal's JCR Quartile Ranking (Q1-Q4)
How to check a journal's quartile (Q1-Q4) in JCR, Scopus CiteScore, and SJR, including a worked example, the free lookup route, plus how JIF and quart…
Hybrid Open Access Journals Explained
What a hybrid open access journal is, how the per-article APC option works, why it draws "double dipping" criticism, and how Plan S, transformative ag…
Impact Factor vs. h-index: Journal Metric vs. Author MetricComparison
The Journal Impact Factor measures a journal's average citation rate; the h-index measures an individual researcher's own productivity and citation im…
Impact Factor vs. SJR (SCImago Journal Rank): What’s the Difference?Comparison
Impact Factor (JIF) is a flat 2-year citation average published by Clarivate from Web of Science data. SJR is a free, PageRank-style weighted prestige…
In the Library with the Lead Pipe Peer Review
Is In the Library with the Lead Pipe peer reviewed? Explore its open peer review model, DOAJ indexing, reviewer criteria, and how to verify article st…
International Open Access Week: What It Is, 2026 Dates, and Why It Matters
International Open Access Week is the annual, SPARC-coordinated global observance promoting open access to research. This guide covers its history, th…
IReL: Ireland's Research eLibrary Consortium and Its Transformative Agreements
IReL is the national consortium — hosted by Maynooth University — through which Irish universities and research institutes license journal access and…
Is a Journal Indexed in Web of Science? How to Check and What It Means
How Clarivate's free Master Journal List works: searching by title or ISSN, what a journal profile page shows, and how it differs from being indexed i…
Ithaka S+R: Higher Ed Research and Strategy
A guide to Ithaka S+R: how the ITHAKA research service conducts national surveys, supports academic libraries, and publishes open reports for higher e…
Jisc and the UK's National Open-Access Negotiations: How the Consortium Model Works
Jisc negotiates national Read-and-Publish open-access agreements on behalf of UK universities, but each institution separately decides whether to sign…
Journal Indexing: DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science and What Being Indexed Actually Means
A journal can be indexed in DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science, all three, or none, and each database runs a different evaluation process. This guide explai…
KEMÖ: Austria's National Academic Library Consortium and Its Open-Access Agreements
KEMÖ (Kooperation E-Medien Österreich) is Austria's national academic library consortium, negotiating open-access agreements with major publishers --…
Lens.org vs. Scopus: Open Patent-and-Scholarly Search vs. Subscription Citation DatabaseComparison
Lens.org is a free, non-profit platform combining scholarly and patent search; Scopus is Elsevier's subscription citation database behind CiteScore. C…
LISTA Database: Scope, Search and Alternatives
Complete guide to EBSCO's Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA): journal coverage, interface search steps, strengths, and compar…
MARC Record: Structure, Fields and MARC 21 Explained
What a MARC record is, how MARC 21 is structured (leader, directory, tags, subfields) and how to read one, with MARCXML, MODS and BIBFRAME compared.…
Mirror Journals: What They Are, Plan S Compliance, and Impact Factor
A mirror journal is a fully open-access sister title sharing its editorial board with a subscription parent journal. Here is how it works, whether it…
MIT and Harvard's Institutional Rights-Retention Open Access Policies Compared
MIT (2009) and Harvard (2008-2014, school by school) were among the first universities to adopt faculty-voted rights-retention open access policies --…
OASPA: The Membership Criteria and Standards Behind the Open-Access Publishers' Association
OASPA (the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) is a trade association publishers join, not a journal directory. Here is what its Membership…
Open Access Book and Monograph Publishing Explained
Open access book and monograph publishing runs on different funding, licensing, peer-review, and discovery mechanics than open access journal publishi…
Open Access Publishing: Models, Mandates, and Why It Matters
A foundational overview of open access publishing: what it means, why funders require it, the gold/green/diamond/hybrid models, licensing, and major f…
PRESS 2015: Peer Reviewing a Systematic Review Search Strategy
The PRESS 2015 checklist's six elements for peer-reviewing a systematic review search strategy before it runs, how it differs from PRISMA-S, and who s…
Projekt DEAL: Germany's National Publish-and-Read Consortium
What Projekt DEAL is, how its Publish-and-Read agreements work, and how the Wiley, Springer Nature, and Elsevier negotiations played out.…
Public Access vs. Open Access: What's the Actual Difference?Comparison
Public access and open access overlap but are not the same thing: public access is a funder compliance mandate requiring deposit and free reading of a…
Read & Publish (Transformative) Agreements: How They Work for Authors
How Read & Publish (transformative) agreements work for authors: what they cover, how library consortia negotiate and fund them, eligibility rules…
Rights Retention Strategy: The Funder-vs-Publisher Conflict Authors Face
How the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy puts authors between a funder mandate and a publisher copyright policy, how publishers have pushed back,…
Royal Danish Library National Licensing Consortium: How Denmark Negotiates Its Open-Access Publishing Agreements
How the Royal Danish Library negotiates Denmark's national open-access publishing agreements, replacing DEFF since 2019, and what read-and-publish and…
Scopus vs Web of Science vs OpenAlex: Comparing Bibliographic DatabasesComparison
Scopus and Web of Science are subscription citation databases used for journal-quality checks and quartile/impact-factor reporting. OpenAlex is a free…
Searching Grey Literature for a Systematic Review
How to search grey literature for a systematic review: which sources to check (theses, trial registries, conference abstracts, preprints, government/N…
Self-Archiving Research Papers for Green Open Access: A Practical How-To
A step-by-step guide to self-archiving: identifying the permitted manuscript version, checking embargo periods via Open Policy Finder, choosing a repo…
Should Junior Researchers Pay Their Own Article Processing Charge? A Career-Stage Guide
What PhD students, postdocs, and unfunded or independent researchers can do before paying an article processing charge out of pocket -- fee waivers, l…
Sikt: How Norway's National Consortium Negotiates Open-Access Publishing Agreements
Sikt is the Norwegian agency that negotiates national open-access publishing agreements with major academic publishers on behalf of Norwegian universi…
TCI (Thai-Journal Citation Index): Tiers, Indexing Criteria and What Tier 1 Means
Thailand's Thai-Journal Citation Index classifies journals into Tier 1, 2 and 3 on fixed five-year rounds. What each tier means, how Tier 1 was scored…
The Journal Checker Tool: How Authors Verify Plan S / Funder Compliance Before Submitting
How the Journal Checker Tool actually works: the three inputs authors enter, what Compliant/Non-Compliant/Unknown mean, the three Plan S compliance ro…
UKB and Universities of the Netherlands: How the Dutch Library Consortium Negotiates Open-Access Agreements
UKB, the Dutch university-library consortium, negotiates open-access agreements through its UKBsis programme, while Universities of the Netherlands (U…
UKRI Open Access Policy for Journal Articles and REF 2029 Requirements
How UKRI's open access policy for journal articles and conference papers (CC BY, no embargo, effective 1 April 2022) works, and how it connects to REF…
UKRI Open Access Policy for Monographs, Book Chapters, and Edited Collections
UKRI's open access policy for monographs, book chapters, and edited collections, effective 1 January 2024: the 12-month deposit window, CC BY/Open Gov…
Unpaywall: Free Open-Access-Status Detection Database, API, and Browser Extension
Unpaywall is OurResearch's free database, API, and browser extension for detecting legal open-access copies of scholarly articles by DOI. This guide c…
Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy: Requirements and Compliance
Wellcome Trust's Open Access Policy requires immediate, embargo-free, CC-BY-licensed access to peer-reviewed articles from Wellcome-funded research. C…
What Is an Institutional Repository? A Researcher's Guide
An institutional repository is the online archive an organization runs for its own researchers' outputs, and the core infrastructure behind green open…
What Is Plan S? The Open Access Funder Mandate Explained
Plan S is cOAlition S's funder mandate requiring immediate, CC BY-licensed open access for funded research outputs. Here is how it works, its three co…
What Is Sherpa Juliet? The Funder Open Access Policy Database
Sherpa Juliet catalogued funder open access and data policies before Jisc merged it with Sherpa Romeo and Sherpa Fact into Open Policy Finder in Novem…
Why and How Scopus Delists Journals: The Discontinuation Process Explained
How Elsevier decides to discontinue a journal from Scopus, what triggers a CSAB re-evaluation, what happens to already-indexed articles, and how to ch…
WikiJournal: How Community-Reviewed Open-Access Publishing Works
WikiJournal (Medicine, Science, Humanities) is a small, volunteer-run, diamond open-access journal family with an open, published peer review process…

Research Information & Identifiers

ARK Identifiers Explained: Persistent IDs Beyond DOI, ORCID, and ROR
What ARK (Archival Resource Key) identifiers are, who governs the specification via the ARK Alliance, how they differ from DOI in cost and registratio…
BanglaJOL (Bangladesh Journals Online): What It Hosts and How Access Works
BanglaJOL is Bangladesh’s national platform for locally published scholarly journals, part of the INASP-founded Journals Online (JOL) family. This gui…
Bibliometric Analysis: Methodology, Workflow, and How to Conduct One
What bibliometric analysis is, the step-by-step workflow for conducting one, and a landscape overview of techniques from citation counts to co-word an…
CNKI Explained: What It Is and How to Use a Citation Into It
CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) is China's largest academic database of journals, dissertations, conference papers, and newspapers. Wha…
CRIS vs Institutional Repository vs RIMS: What's the Difference?Comparison
CRIS and RIMS name the same type of system under different regional conventions; an institutional repository is a narrower, distinct system for storin…
CWTS Leiden Ranking and the Leiden Manifesto: Methodology for Responsible University Research Assessment
The CWTS Leiden Ranking is a computed bibliometric university ranking; the Leiden Manifesto is a 10-principle methodology statement about using metric…
DSpace vs. EPrints vs. Digital Commons vs. Fedora: Institutional Repository Software ComparedComparison
A side-by-side comparison of the four platforms institutions most often weigh when choosing institutional repository software: open-source DSpace and…
ERIC Database: What It Indexes and How to Search It
ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is the free, federally funded bibliographic database for education research — what it indexes, EJ vs ED…
Essential Science Indicators (ESI): Fields, Citation Thresholds, Research Fronts and Hot Papers
Essential Science Indicators benchmarks Web of Science papers against 22 field-and-year cohorts. How the top 1% highly cited and top 0.1% hot paper th…
Field-Weighted Citation Impact: Reading and Reporting the Number
How to read an FWCI figure correctly wherever you find it — SciVal, a CRIS export, a grant report — and how to report it responsibly, with the self-ci…
Google Scholar vs. Scopus: Coverage, Citation Counting, and Author IDs ComparedComparison
Google Scholar is a free, automatically-indexed search engine with the broadest coverage and highest citation counts; Scopus is Elsevier’s curated, su…
Google Scholar vs. Web of ScienceComparison
Google Scholar is a free, algorithmically-crawled index with broad coverage; Web of Science is a paid, editorially-curated database with narrower, aud…
HEC eportal and eServices: Which Portal Runs Degree Attestation and Equivalence, and Why Logins Fail
HEC runs several separate online portals. Degree attestation and equivalence moved to eservices.hec.gov.pk, while the legacy eportal is still live wit…
HEC National Digital Library: How Access Actually Works for Pakistani Researchers
How institutional and off-campus access to Pakistan's HEC National Digital Library actually works, who is eligible, why publisher coverage varies by l…
How ROR, ISNI, Ringgold, and GRID Cross-Reference Each Other
How ROR, ISNI, Ringgold, and GRID actually map to each other: what ROR's external_ids schema formally supports, why Ringgold needs an ISNI or Wikidata…
How to Search Web of Science Effectively
A practical guide to searching Web of Science: basic vs. advanced search, field tags (TS=, AU=, SO=, and more), Boolean and proximity operators, Cited…
How to Use WorldCat to Find and Request Materials
A practical guide to using WorldCat as a research tool: locating held items, understanding holdings data, requesting via interlibrary loan, the OCLC n…
Identifier Crosswalk: Connecting DOI, ORCID, ROR, and Institutional IDs in Practice
A practical, systems-level look at how DOI, ORCID, and ROR identifiers actually link in real Crossref/DataCite metadata records, how an institutional…
IMIST (Morocco): National Scientific and Technical Information Institute
InCommon Explained: The US Research and Education Identity Federation
InCommon is the identity federation operated by Internet2 that lets a US researcher's campus login work at thousands of external services. This guide…
Is Web of Science Citation Data Reliable for Research Assessment?
Web of Science citation data is curated and historically deep, but has documented coverage gaps by discipline, language, and document type, and counts…
KENET: Kenya's Research and Education Network (NREN) Explained
What KENET (Kenya's National Research and Education Network) is, how its membership and connectivity services work, how it runs eduroam, and how NRENs…
Metadata Search Engines for Scholarly Research: OpenAlex, Dimensions, Google Scholar, CORE, BASE, and Semantic Scholar Compared
What a scholarly metadata search engine is, how it differs from generic web search and SEO metadata tools, and how OpenAlex, Dimensions, Google Schola…
NASA ADS (Astrophysics Data System): What It Is and How to Search It
What NASA ADS (adsabs) is, who operates it, the search syntax that matters, and how to connect ORCID so claimed papers are trusted.…
OpenAlex: What It Is and How It Works
A practical guide to OpenAlex: the free, CC0 scholarly metadata graph from OurResearch that succeeded Microsoft Academic Graph — its core entities, AP…
OpenAthens Explained: How It Works and How It Differs from Shibboleth and EZproxy
What OpenAthens is, how the OpenAthens account model relates to institutional SSO, and how its SAML federation differs from Shibboleth and from EZprox…
OpenCitations and I4OC: Open Citation Data vs. Web of Science and Scopus
How OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) provide free, CC0-licensed, machine-readable citation data as an open alternative to su…
Persistent Identifier Federation Across Research Infrastructure
How DOI, ORCID, ROR, and RAiD registries interconnect through the PID Graph and current RDA/NISO standards work, and why machine-actionable federation…
Persistent Identifiers and Citation for AI Models and Training Datasets
How to mint a persistent identifier for a trained AI model or training dataset, what a model card needs to document to make that identifier meaningful…
Philippine E-Journals (PEJ): What It Covers and How to Use It
How Philippine E-Journals (PEJ) aggregates Philippine-published scholarship, how subscription vs open access actually works, and how to find Philippin…
RCAAP: Portugal's Open Access Repository Portal Explained
RCAAP is Portugal's national open-access repository service. Learn its four services, the steps to join the Portal and how to read the Validador's rep…
Shibboleth Single Sign-On: How Federated SAML Authentication Works
Shibboleth is the open-source SAML software behind "Login via your institution" -- how Identity Provider and Service Provider roles work, how InCommon…
Shodhganga: India's National PhD Thesis Repository (INFLIBNET)
Shodhganga is INFLIBNET's open-access repository of 600,000+ Indian PhD theses. How to search and download it, how UGC-mandated deposit works, and how…
Shodhgangotri: INFLIBNET's PhD Synopsis Repository
Shodhgangotri is INFLIBNET's repository of approved PhD research synopses submitted at registration — the companion collection to Shodhganga, which ho…
VOSviewer vs. CiteSpace vs. Bibliometrix: Comparing Bibliometric Analysis ToolsComparison
VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and Bibliometrix are the three leading free bibliometric-analysis tools, but they solve different problems: network mapping, tre…
VOSviewer: Bibliometric Mapping, Co-Citation, and Keyword-Network Analysis
What VOSviewer is, how its interface and workflow work, its core bibliometric-mapping use cases, and how it compares to CiteSpace, Gephi, and Bibliome…
Web of Science Citation Report: What It Measures and How to Read It
How the Web of Science Citation Report aggregates citation metrics (h-index, citations per year, average citations per item) across a search result se…
What Is ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)?
What ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (PQDT) covers, how university-mediated deposit works, the author-rights difference between Traditional and…

Research Tools & Software

Backing Up and Restoring a Zotero Library
Zotero's sync keeps devices current, but the server only holds the most recent version -- not a backup history. This guide covers what's actually in t…
Citation Chaining and Snowballing a Literature Search
Backward (reference-list) and forward (cited-by) citation chaining, the tools that make each practical, how to combine chaining with a database search…
Citation Management Software for a Research Group: Shared Libraries, Licensing, and Ownership
Deploying citation management software for a research group is a different problem from choosing one for yourself. Library ownership and succession, s…
Citing Sources in PowerPoint with Zotero
Zotero has no official PowerPoint plugin. Here are the four real ways to get a correctly formatted citation onto a slide, and what each one costs you…
Embase vs MEDLINE: Coverage, Indexing and Why Reviews Search BothComparison
Embase covers ~98% of MEDLINE journals plus 3,516 more, holds 17M+ records MEDLINE lacks, and indexes 18,098 conferences MEDLINE does not touch. The t…
EndNote Cite While You Write Explained: What CWYW Actually Stores in Your Document
Cite While You Write inserts a hidden field code, not plain text, at every citation. Here's what that data actually holds and why it matters for co-au…
EndNote Click (Formerly Kopernio): What It Retrieves, and Who Configures Your Institution's Access
EndNote Click is the browser extension formerly called Kopernio: subscription Version of Record first, open access second, your link resolver third. I…
Exporting a Zotero Library into EndNote
Two ways to migrate a Zotero library into EndNote — RIS export for references only, and EndNote XML export to bring attached PDFs along — plus the ite…
Google Scholar Advanced Search: Which Operators Actually Work (and Which Silently Fail)
Google Scholar honours only a handful of search operators, documents almost none of them, and returns plausible results for the ones it ignores. An ev…
Google Scholar Alerts: The Three Types, Why They Decay, and How to Design a Query That Lasts
A Scholar alert is a saved query that runs unattended for years, and it inherits every silent failure of Scholar’s query parser. The three alert types…
How to Use EndNote: A Researcher's First-Project Walkthrough
A first-project walkthrough of EndNote 2025 on Windows and macOS: build a library that will not corrupt, import from a database, attach PDFs, cite in…
Installing and Editing EndNote Output Styles
How to find a journal-specific EndNote output style you don't already have, install the .ens file, and edit one in the Style Editor when no exact matc…
Installing EndNote Cite While You Write in Word: Both Platforms, and the Two Repairs Vendor Docs Bury
Cite While You Write is not a separate download - it installs with EndNote Desktop. This page covers the install order that breaks it, the Windows COM…
LibKey Nomad, BrowZine and Lean Library Compared: What the Library Configures and What the Researcher SeesComparison
Two of these three are the same vendor, and the third stopped being a SAGE product in December 2025. A comparison written along the real fault line: w…
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): What It Is and How to Search It
LCSH explained: what the Library of Congress subject headings are, which LC file answers which question, and how to use them for literature discovery.…
MeSH Terms in PubMed: Explosion, Major Topic, Subheadings — and What MeSH Alone Misses
Explosion, [majr] and subheadings are the three mechanics that change what a MeSH search returns — each documented against NLM’s PubMed User Guide and…
Open Access Button Shut Down in November 2025: The Legal Full-Text Routes That Replace It
Open Access Button, the browser extension and request-a-copy tool for finding legal full text, was sunset by OA.Works on November 18, 2025. Here is wh…
PubMed vs Google Scholar for Biomedical SearchingComparison
PubMed's curated MEDLINE indexing and documented MeSH syntax vs Google Scholar's broad, uncurated crawl -- what each actually covers, how their search…
RefWorks: What It Is, Institutional Licensing, and How to Migrate Your Library
RefWorks is a Clarivate/ProQuest reference manager distributed almost entirely through institutional library subscriptions rather than sold to individ…
Scopus Advanced Search Syntax: Field Codes, Proximity Operators, and Precedence Rules
A precise reference to Scopus's advanced search syntax: field codes, the W/n vs PRE/n proximity-operator distinction, boolean precedence pitfalls, and…
Searching the Cochrane Library: CENTRAL vs. CDSR, and Building a Trials-Register Search
A guide to what CENTRAL, CDSR, Cochrane Protocols and Cochrane Clinical Answers actually are, how they differ, and the MeSH-descriptor, field-code, an…
Sharing a Zotero Library: Group Setup, Permissions, and Storage Quota
How to share a Zotero library with collaborators using a group library: group types, member roles, the three permission settings, and what happens to…
Switching EndNote to a Numbered Style in Word (Vancouver, IEEE)
A task-specific walkthrough for converting an EndNote Cite While You Write document to a numbered output style (Vancouver, IEEE), forcing a full renum…
The PubMed Advanced Search Builder: Numbered History, Field Tags, and Reading Search Details
The Advanced Search page gives you a Builder, a numbered History and a Search Details expander. The third is the one that matters: PubMed routinely ru…
The RIS File Format: Tag Reference, Why Exports Differ, and How to Repair One by Hand
RIS is the plain-text citation format behind almost every "Export citation" button. This reference covers what the specification actually requires, wh…
Using the PubMed E-utilities API: ESearch, EFetch, ELink and the 9,999-Record Ceiling
A measured, end-to-end walkthrough of pulling a department or author publication set from PubMed over HTTP: ESearch, EFetch, ELink, EPost and the Hist…
Using the Scopus API: API Key, Institutional Token, and Search vs. Abstract Retrieval
A practical guide to the Scopus API: getting an API key from the Elsevier Developer Portal, the institutional-token entitlement wall that blocks most…
Using the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API: Batch Recipes and Real Rate Limits
Three worked recipes for the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API — resolving DOIs in 500-id batches, pulling citation contexts, and bulk retrieval tha…
Using Zotero with Google Docs: The Word Round-Trip and Shared-Document Failures
Zotero stores Google Docs citations as links, not field codes. That single fact explains the dead citations after a .docx download, the collaborator w…
Why PubMed Doesn't Report a Journal Impact Factor
PubMed indexes articles and journal metadata; it isn't a citation-metrics product. Here's the structural reason it has no Impact Factor field, and exa…
Zotero Storage Plans and Quota Management
What actually consumes a Zotero storage quota, the free and paid plans, the stored-vs-linked attachment choice that controls it, and the WebDAV self-h…

Research Data Management

CARE Principles vs. FAIR Principles: Indigenous Data Governance ExplainedComparison
CARE Principles govern authority and ethics over Indigenous Peoples' data; FAIR Principles govern technical findability and reuse of research data gen…
Checksum Verification and Fixity Checking for Archived Research Data
How checksum verification and fixity checking work, why trustworthy-repository frameworks like CoreTrustSeal and the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservati…
CLOCKSS: The Dark Archive Explained
What CLOCKSS is, how its dark archive is governed and triggered, how to check a journal in the Keepers reports, and how it differs from LOCKSS and Por…
CoreTrustSeal Certification: Requirements, Process, and Whether It's Worth Pursuing
The full 16 CoreTrustSeal requirements, the self-assessment and peer-review process end to end, real certified-repository examples, and practical guid…
Data Curation Tools: What Researchers and RDM Staff Actually Use
A survey of the real software and services used for research data curation: repository-integrated review workflows (Dataverse, Figshare, Dryad, DSpace…
Data Rescue Projects: Recovering At-Risk Scientific Data Before It's Lost
What data rescue projects are, why at-risk research and environmental data gets lost, and how real initiatives like Data Refuge, DataRescue, and IEDRO…
Data Stewardship and the Data Curator Role in Research
What data stewards and data curators actually do day to day, how the role differs from a data manager or data librarian, and where it typically sits i…
Dryad Data Repository: Costs, Curation, and DMP Fit
A practical look at Dryad's curated submission workflow, its CC0-default licensing, current Data Publishing Charges, and where it fits relative to Zen…
Dublin Core Metadata Record: A Fully Worked Example
A complete, fully filled-out Dublin Core metadata record for an illustrative research dataset, covering all fifteen elements plus Simple vs. Qualified…
FAIR vs CARE — data principles comparedComparison
FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) is a technical standard for machine-actionable data. CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Contr…
Figshare Data Repository: Features, Certification, and DMP Fit
A practical look at figshare as a generalist data repository: features, certification status (ISO 27001 vs CoreTrustSeal), and how to use it in a DMP.…
Figshare vs Dryad — which data repository fits your workflow?Comparison
Figshare is a broad, self-service repository for nearly any research output type, with free and institutional tiers; Dryad is a smaller non-profit rep…
How to Choose a Metadata Schema for a Dataset
A decision framework for choosing between Dublin Core, the DataCite Metadata Schema, DDI, schema.org/Dataset, and discipline-specific schemas based on…
How to Choose an Open Data Repository
Choosing an open data repository is a DMP commitment that also determines whether your deposit is discoverable and reportable through your institution…
Institutional Repository vs. Subject RepositoryComparison
An institutional repository collects one institution's research outputs across all disciplines; a subject repository collects one field's outputs from…
Institutional Repository vs. ZenodoComparison
An institutional repository ties a deposit to a researcher's own university, with local branding and reporting; Zenodo is a free, CERN-run generalist…
InvenioRDM: The Open-Source Repository Platform Behind Zenodo
InvenioRDM is the free, open-source repository application that Zenodo itself runs on. This guide covers what it is, who governs it, which institution…
ISO 15489: Records Management Concepts and Principles for Research Institutions
ISO 15489 is the international standard defining what makes an institutional record authentic and trustworthy, and how retention/disposition decisions…
Mendeley Data vs. Zenodo: Which Generalist Repository Fits Your Dataset?Comparison
Mendeley Data and Zenodo compared on institutional backing, disciplinary scope, storage limits, DOI issuance, versioning, and licensing for researcher…
NIH Open Access Publishing Fee Limits: The Proposed APC Cap Explained
NIH has proposed, but not yet finalized, a cap on how much grant funding can go toward open access publishing fees (APCs). This guide covers the propo…
Research Repositories: What Counts as One, and How They Differ From Archives
Not every place research output is stored qualifies as a repository. Here is what distinguishes a research repository from a general archive, institut…
RO-Crate: Packaging Research Data and Metadata for FAIR Reuse
RO-Crate is a lightweight, JSON-LD-based specification for packaging research data, workflows, and software with rich, machine-readable metadata. What…
Zenodo vs. Dryad: Which Data Repository Fits Your Dataset?Comparison
Zenodo is a free, self-service, CERN-operated repository best known for GitHub-release archiving. Dryad is a curated, journal-integrated repository wi…
Zenodo vs. Figshare: Which Repository for Your Research Data?Comparison
Zenodo and Figshare compared: operator/funding, cost, file-size limits, licensing, curation, GitHub software archiving, institutional branding, and Co…
Zenodo vs. OSF: Repository or Workspace?Comparison
Zenodo and OSF get confused because both come out of the open-science infrastructure world, but they solve different problems: Zenodo is a DOI-minting…
Zenodo: The CERN and OpenAIRE General-Purpose Research Repository
Zenodo is CERN and OpenAIRE's free, general-purpose research repository, open to any discipline and output type. Here is what it accepts, how its DOI…

Research Methods & Statistics

New Librarianship: Principles & Methods
An analysis of New Librarianship theory, exploring conversation-based knowledge creation, participatory services, and academic research library practi…
The CRAAP Test and Evaluating Source Credibility in Research
How to apply the CRAAP test (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose) to scholarly sources, where it falls short, and how lateral reading, S…
What Is Information Science? Fields, Methods and Funding
Information science is the study of how information is created, represented, organized, retrieved and used. This guide covers its subfields, methods,…
What Is Library Science? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths
Library science is the study of how information and knowledge resources are organized, retrieved, preserved, and made usable — its subfields, funding…

Scholarly Writing

Dimensions AI: What It Is and How Its AI Research Features Work
Dimensions AI explained: the AI Summarization, Research GPT, Research Strategy, and Chat with PDF features built into Digital Sciences Dimensions plat…
How to MLA Cite a Film or Movie
How to MLA cite films and documentaries: works-cited format, director-first or title-first examples, streaming, and in-text time stamps (MLA 9th ed.).…
Poster Presentation Dimensions: Layout & Sizing
Standard conference poster presentation dimensions, including 48x36-inch and A0 setups, PowerPoint scaling, aspect ratios, and typography specificatio…

Grants Management & Research Funding

National Leadership Grants for Libraries: Guide
A guide to IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries: funding tracks up to $1M, eligibility rules, cost sharing, and two-phase applications on Gra…
Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications: Requirements & Current Status
How Canada's Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications works: the 12-month green/gold compliance routes, how it differs from the Tri-Agency RDM Po…

Research Integrity & Compliance

Why Journals Get Delisted from Web of Science (and What It Means)
Clarivate removes journals from the Web of Science Core Collection when they fail its 24 quality criteria. Here is how the evaluation and “on hold” pr…

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