Research Priorities and Emerging Gaps in Public Library Studies: A Text-Mining Perspective on Scopus Literature

Abstract

Public libraries have evolved from institutions centered on physical collections to community-oriented organizations addressing diverse digital, social, and informational needs. This study examines the longitudinal evolution of research priorities in public library studies. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on 5,084 documents listed in Scopus that were published from 1889 to 2026. The textual data were first preprocessed using Python libraries NLTK and scikit-learn, and subsequently subjected to LDA topic modeling, TF-IDF to generate clusters of themes and to perform a temporal analysis of trends, and co-occurrence analysis of keywords. The results of this analysis indicated that 15 essential themes were identified, and the focus of research in the library and information science has transformed areas such as law, collection management, education roles, and administration to areas such as digital technologies, community engagement, health information services, and social inclusion. Trends in publications suggest that there is an ever-increasing interest in digital access and community-oriented services, which should be further investigated, while some topics such as leadership impact, impact assessment, and services for the marginalized appear to get less attention. Public library research has progressively evolved toward a digital and community-centered paradigm. The proposed text-mining framework provides a scalable approach for monitoring the intellectual evolution of the field and identifying future research priorities.