Assessment of Article publication on Public Library and Social Capital Generation: A Database Analysis.

Abstract

Social capital is a concept that spans across various social landscape with growing necessity for social trust within the society, as well as potential negative effects arising from social inequality and exclusion, which has made social capital a topical issue in research in the past decade. This database analysis assesses the frequency of research output and identifies gaps in knowledge, and potential roles of the public library on social capital generation in the society.
This study is a descriptive study of research publication on public library and social capital that are indexed in Web of Science and EBSCOHost, the University of Malaya Library from 2007 to 2015. It enumerated the number of articles per year, source types, subjects’ coverage, and languages of publication, geography, publishers and content providers.
The search resulted in 19 articles from WoS and 10 from EBSCOhost according to relevance from three distinct sources like academic journals, reviews, and conferences. The articles covered 21 subjects and in 3 languages from 11 geographical locations by 20 publishers and 5 content providers.
The result revealed a decline in research on public library and social capital generation. Further research into public libraries and social capital in more databases with related include keywords such as social inclusion, inequality and trust is advanced.