Discovering the structure and impact of the digital library evaluation domain

The multidimensional nature of digital libraries evaluation domain poses several challenges to the research communities that intend to assess criteria, methods, products and tools, and also practice them. The amount of scientific production that is published in the domain hinders and disorientates the interested researchers. These researchers need guidance to exploit effectively the considerable amount of data and the diversity of methods, as well as to identify new research goals and develop their plans for future studies. This paper proposes a methodological pathway to investigate the core topics that structure the digital library evaluation domain and their impact. Further to the exploration of these topical entities, this study investigates also the researchers that contribute substantially to key topics, their communities and their relationships. The proposed methodology exploits topic modeling and network analysis in combination with citation and altmetrics analysis on a corpus consisting of the digital library evaluation papers presented in JCDL, ECDL/TDPL and ICADL conferences in the period 2001–2013.