The Current Portrait of Library and Information Science Doctoral Students in the USA

According to the ALISE Statistical Report (ALISE, 2021), 31 schools offered LIS doctoral programs in the USA, but only 26 schools provided information on their current doctoral students on the school website. Another two schools were added from the list gathered by Sugimoto et al. (2009) on their attempt to portray the LIS doctoral education landscape from 1930-2007. A manual web-scraping was employed following Thota and Ramez (2021) by searching for publicly available data of doctoral students enrolled in LIS programs in the USA. A sampling frame was created from the information published on the LIS school websites, including doctoral students’ full names, affiliations, profile pages, email contacts, genders, and research areas. The Airtable platform was used to create a dashboard of doctoral student profiles, where all personal identifiable information was removed prior to inputting the data into the platform. Then, the dashboard serves as an input for the work-in-progress poster, displaying a portrait of 218 doctoral students from five schools located in four regional areas (Midwest, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest). The majority of doctoral students are female (63.8%), and the three top areas of research grouped by the ALISE research taxonomy are data science, human-computer interaction & design, and information technologies. The study aims to provide a valuable resource for the future information professional talent pool. The findings from the study can serve as an input for ALISE to use, maintain and continually update this talent pool to create a supportive culture for identity development of information professionals.