Scientometrics landscape: Mapping source mortality and citation dynamics of library science

The study investigates the structural health of scholarly publications in library science indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database by scrutinising 103 journals and book series. The study provided a unique perspective on analysing the indexing cycle of these sources by distinguishing between nominal and real mortality of these publications. It facilitates researchers' and librarians' decisions in selecting publications with high-quality metrics using the Pearson correlation technique. The correlation technique evaluates the association between ‘Popularity, Prestige and Contextual Impact’ of different journals and book series with the help of Cite Score, SJR and SNIP scores. The data has been extracted from the ‘Scopus source list of November 2025’ and the Scopus homepage of each publication. Our study reveals that the Real Mortality of publications is lower than Nominal Mortality. The attempt to study the indexing cycle of 103 publications in the field of library science helps to understand the process of evolving management through incorporation, rebranding, mergers, temporary and permanent discontinuation of publications. The study facilitates long-term subscription planning by offering conclusive insights regarding the indexing cycle, interpretation of the triangular correlation matrix between Cite-score, SJR and SNIP. The high correlation score among all three variables concludes that these three different indicators of quality complement each other. The researcher may employ any one of the three scores to determine the quality of publications in the field of library science.