The University of Tennessee’s School of Information Sciences is ranked No. 1 in the nation for per capita journal articles published by its faculty, according to a study from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Additionally, SIS Professor Carol Tenopir is ranked as the most research productive library and information science (LIS) faculty member in the United States.

The study, “Scholarly Productivity of U.S. LIS Faculty,” was published in the Autumn 2006 edition of Library and Information Science Research.
Research is an essential part of practice and teaching and, in an applied field like LIS, research is particularly important to the future of publishing, libraries and information access.Carol Tenopir
“The per capita ranking is an important and solid measure of a program’s research productivity, since it takes into account the significant variability of faculty sizes in LIS programs throughout the United States,” Ed Cortez, director of UT’s SIS, said.

“The School of Information Sciences currently has 13 faculty members, but at the time of the study only 11 faculty lines where filled. Just as per capita income is considered as a true measure of a nation’s wealth, a program’s per capita journal articles attests to its true measure of value and productivity.”

In the same study, UT’s SIS was ranked No. 2 among all U.S. LIS programs in the number of journal articles published and No. 3 in the researchers’ cumulative program rankings.

Tenopir said she frequently meets with journal editors and librarians and hears how important scholarly research is to keeping them on the cutting-edge of information science.

“Research is an essential part of practice and teaching and, in an applied field like LIS, research is particularly important to the future of publishing, libraries and information access,” she said.

U.S. News & World Report ranked UT’s School of Information Sciences 16th out of 56 graduate programs in library and information sciences accredited by the American Library Association.