Marketing in the field of information disciplines: Research trends in Latin America (1985-2012)

This study seeks to clarify research trends related to marketing in the field of information disciplines from Latin American scientific production. As a reference source, we used the electronic journals indexed in the Latindex Directory. Some bibliometric indicators were applied to 108 documents; these indicators were as follows: productivity by year, journals, authors, language, and finally term cooccurrence analysis. It was evident that the highest rate of productivity was found in Brazilian journals and authors, and in the Portuguese language. The four main clusters in term co-occurrence analysis in the most relevant topics were as follows: marketing of the information professional in the labor market, library marketing, marketing of information products and services, and marketing information management. From another point of view, four kinds of traits were also identified, as follows: the marketing object, organizational context, disciplinary perspective, and the most commonly used marketing tools and techniques. It wasfound that marketing in Infomation Sciences is a relevant topic in the Latin American research activity. In addition, it was possible to establish the productivity of some journals (51.4%) that are not included in the most relevant databases.