A CO-WORD ANALYSIS OF SELECTED LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE ARABIC LITERATURE: IDENTIFYING RESEARCH TRENDS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY.

Keywords placed at the forefront of research and studies play a significant role in revealing the content of those works. This study aims to monitor and analyze keywords related to various branches of information technology, as found in a sample of studies published in peer-reviewed Arab journals in the field of library and information science, available in the "Mandumah" database during the period from 2023 to 2025, to identify the current state of these keywords. The study adopts a descriptive analytical approach and employs the content analysis method. It is based on the direct examination of keywords in the selected research and studies, and their analysis using a checklist. The study reached a set of results, most notably that the study sample provided 242 keywords, and that about 22.19% of those studies had no keywords, and the general average number of keywords for the study was five keywords, and the number of components for keywords ranged between one word to eight keywords, and it was the highest percentage of the two words, and it was found that the journals did not care to include in the publishing rules some instructions for keywords. The distribution of the keywords according to subject revealed that the concepts got 92% of them, 78.54% in the field of libraries and information, while the entities (names of institutions, places, people, etc.) got 8%. There is a need to present the keywords in an acceptable manner based on the guidelines provided by the journals, as well as the importance of having a list of reliable keywords has been shown.