Exploring research fields through institutional contributions to academic journals

Academic journals are vehicles for the dissemination and sharing of science. They can form the basis in digital libraries for an exploration of a research field. Bibliometric journal studies have frequently taken the author as the focus of study when researching the activity of research in a field, and more seldom the affiliation (research institutions, universities, etc.). In this study, institutional contributions to ten library and information journals are explored using measures that have previously been employed in author studies. The so-called continuants, movers, newcomers and transients are used to analyse the data. The results show that there are great differences across journals when it comes to the distribution of institutions and their contributions to the journals under study. Some journals have many institutions contributing regularly. Others are characterized by many institutions contributing infrequently or rarely. The implications for exploring research fields in digital libraries are considered.