Scientometric Portrait of Dr. S. R. Ranganathan: A Study

Abstract

The study of Scientometric portraits actually covers the biographical study of the contribution of eminent scientists and researchers in the respective disciplines. This type of study is very essential in this global information age to get a clear picture of the entire contributions of the renowned scholars. The present study is on the Scientometric portrait of Dr. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, the doyen of Library and Information Science (LIS). The study has been carried out to investigate the entire publications of S .R. Ranganathan as well as the citations received by him as depicted in Google scholar database. His scholarly works laid the foundation of modern day library science. Ranganathan’s contributions with their corresponding citations collected from the Google scholar database are arranged individually accordingly to the parameters such as item type, title, author, year, subject field and the number of citations received by each publication into the excel sheet. For assigning the subject fields, Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) is used. The data is analysed and interpreted which reveals most productive years to be 1950, 1951, 1965 in the field of LIS. Most of the item types are the books followed by journals. Ranganathan contributed most of the papers as single author and Library classification and cataloguing are the main subjects in which he made maximum contributions. He received 3017 citations during 1952-2014. His well-known book Prolegomena to Library Classification received the maximum number of citations.