The Effects of Political and Social Turmoil on LIS Research in the Arab World

Much of the Arab world has experienced significant political upheaval over the past few years, and government, academic and public libraries across the region have responded to these changes in different ways. Our goal was to investigate how the current circumstances have affected the LIS field, and how LIS practitioners are involved in responding to and documenting these changes. These questions are only part of a larger investigation that we conducted, in which we examined the main topics and author affiliations of 15,000 articles from 39 top and international LIS journals in English and 769 articles in 7 Arabic-language journals between 2004 and 2013. We looked at the publication patterns of LIS researchers in the Arab world, as well as scholars outside of the Arab world studying the region. We wanted to learn not just about what is being studied, but by whom. In this paper we address the following research questions: What do LIS professors and other practitioners across the Arab world study? Do they collaborate with each other, and with scholars elsewhere in the world? How were research topics affected by the Arab Spring?