Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

History

The journal was established in 1950 as a quarterly entitled American Documentation. The new journal was a publication of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), which had formed in 1937 around a group of researchers and practitioners who were interested in the emerging technology of microfilm as a medium for the preservation and dissemination of documents and knowledge. Many of the same people and institutions were involved in a prewar American Library Association journal called The Journal of Documentary Reproduction, which ran from 1938-1943, before being discontinued due to the imperatives of the war.

American Documentation was an explicit continuation of and extension upon The Journal of Documentary Reproduction, with a broader brief to cover documentation as a whole, then defined as "...the creation, transmission, collection, classification and use of 'documents'; documents may be broadly defined as recorded knowledge in any format."

In the postwar years, rapid technological and social changes ushered in an "information explosion" which created many new problems and opportunities of special interest to documentation specialists, and in time documentation found itself at the center of the emerging field of information science. The ADI's membership and scope increased rapidly, and in 1968 the members voted to change the organization's name to "American Society for Information Science", to reflect the changes in their membership and focus. As their official journal, American Documentation followed suit, and beginning with the first issue of 1970 it changed its name to The Journal of the American Society for Information Science, and began publishing bimonthly.

In 1991, the publication frequency increased to 10 issues yearly and by 1996, the journal was publishing monthly. In 2000, ASIS again voted to change its name, this time to The "American Society for Information Science and Technology", in order to recognize the further changes in membership and interests brought on by the rise of the internet and the mainstreaming of networked computing and information technology. The journal's name was subsequently also changed in January 2001 to Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. It obtained its current name in January 2014.

Multidisciplinarity

A study of papers published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in the period 1988-1997 and found, among other things: "Top authors have grown in diversity from those being affiliated predominantly with library/information-related departments to include those from information systems management, information technology, business, and the humanities. Amid heterogeneous clusters of collaboration among top authors, strongly connected crossdisciplinary coauthor pairs have become more prevalent. Correspondingly, the distribution of top keywords' occurrences that leans heavily on core information science has shifted towards other subdisciplines such as information technology and sociobehavioral science."

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in:

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2013 impact factor of 2.230.