Some Aspects of Communication in Scientific Information and Library Science

Bibliometric methodology, particularly citation analysis, was used to characterise scholarly communication within information and library science in Poland regarding the form (electronic or printed) and types of documents cited. Furthermore, the relationships between the form and type of cited documents and the thematic areas represented by the articles was analysed. Articles published in the most important Polish LIS journals and collective works published in 2004 were taken into consideration. The research revealed that LIS communication in Poland is still based on printed documents, first of all journal articles and books. Electronic documents (including websites) play supplementary but indispensable role in this communication. It became obvious, that there is no one pattern of using various forms and types of documents across the whole discipline - individual thematic areas can be characterised by different structures of citations. Some non-deterministic relationships between such structures and thematic areas represented by articles were revealed.