Citation relations of theories of human information behaviour

Interrelation of models and theories of human information behaviour (HIB), their common roots, and the extent to which they are indebted to the fields other than library and information science (LIS) were investigated. Fifty-one theories were selected and their bibliographic information was obtained from Web of Science and then citation analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis were performed. Pajek, HistCite, Sci2 Tool and VOSViewer software were used for analysis and visualization. The results showed that most of the theories were proposed by information scientists. A fewof the theories were proposed by scientists from the fields of sociology, psychology, computer science and a few other disciplines. Citation analysis showed that LIS literature has been used extensively in HIB theories; however, there were also citations to the sources of 29 other fields especially to sociology, communication, psychology, management, educational science and computer science. This is an indication of the interdisciplinary nature of HIB domain. Bibliographic coupling map showed that about four fifths of the theories were linked to each other as a whole network. The development of a large number of theories within the field of LIS is an indication for the increasing maturity of the interdisciplinary research area of HIB as well as the maturity of LIS field. © 2013, Hamid R. Jamali.