What does this research mean for the field?

Public library research has progressively shifted from traditional areas like collection management and administration toward a digital and community-centered paradigm, though gaps remain in studying leadership impact and services for marginalized populations. Novelty: ClaimNovelty.SYNTHESIS. Consensus alignment: ConsensusAlignment.NEUTRAL.

What question did this study set out to answer?

Examine the longitudinal evolution of research priorities and identify emerging thematic gaps in public library scholarship published between 1889 and 2026.

September 2, 2026The International Information & Library Review

Research Priorities and Emerging Gaps in Public Library Studies: A Text-Mining Perspective on Scopus Literature

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Authors

MTMahsa TorabiShiraz University MSMahmood SangariUniversity of Birjand

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Implication

Text-mining analysis reveals shifting focus toward digital access and community services in public library literature, highlighting key gaps in impact assessment and marginalized populations.

Key Points

Examine the longitudinal evolution of research priorities and identify emerging thematic gaps in public library scholarship published between 1889 and 2026.
Retrieved and analyzed 5,084 public library research documents indexed in Scopus across a 137-year span.
Preprocessed textual data using NLTK and scikit-learn Python libraries.
Applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and keyword co-occurrence analysis to evaluate thematic trends over time.
Identified 15 primary thematic clusters, demonstrating a macro-level paradigm shift from traditional topics (law, collection management, administration) toward digital technologies, community engagement, and social inclusion.
Demonstrated accelerating scholarly attention toward digital access and community-oriented services, contrasted with a relative scarcity of research on leadership impact, performance assessment, and services for marginalized groups.

Cite This Study

Torabi et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a97e237c562ede874ec6389 https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2026.2723394

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Implication

Text-mining analysis reveals shifting focus toward digital access and community services in public library literature, highlighting key gaps in impact assessment and marginalized populations.

Research Priorities and Emerging Gaps in Public Library Studies: A Text-Mining Perspective on Scopus Literature

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

Research Priorities and Emerging Gaps in Public Library Studies: A Text-Mining Perspective on Scopus Literature

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

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