BIBLIOMETRIJSKA ANALIZA VJESNIKA BIBLIOTEKARA HRVATSKE: PUBLIKACIJSKA AKTIVNOST, AUTORSTVO I SURADNJA OD 1950. DO 2020.

Purpose. The main objective of this paper is to explore the key bibliometric characteristics, trends and patterns related to publication activity, productivity and collaboration of authors of the papers published in the journal Vjesnik bibliotekara Hrvatske in the period from 1950 to 2020. Approach/methodology/design. The study uses standard bibliometric indicators and tools to analyse 986 papers published in Vjesnik bibliotekara Hrvatske from 1950 to 2020. Findings. The results have shown that Vjesnik, with 95 % of papers published in the Croatian language during the analysed period, used to be and has remained the journal intended for the Croatian community of librarians and other information professionals. Over the last 25 years, Vjesnik has gradually been transformed from a predominantly professional to a scholarly journal that publishes almost the same amount of research (44.2 %) and professional (47.2 %) papers. Moreover, an increasing number of authors (professors and students) from the academic sector publish their research results in Vjesnik. Most of the papers published in the journal are single-authored (72.6 %), but this has started to change from 2010 in favour of multi-authored papers (51.5 %), which indicates the gradual development of the culture of collaboration and the development of collaborative research networks. Research limitations/implications. The non-standard and non-uniform way of stating the author's institutional affiliation in the printed journal and on different web sources (the Hrčak portal and the Archives on the journal's website) required a lot of manual editing, which might have caused potential errors. In the authorship analysis, certain errors in frequency counts of the authors' productivity are possible due to undetected surname changes, most often with female authors due to marriage. Originality/value. The paper presents an in-depth bibliometric research that covers almost the entire publication period (70 years) of Vjesnik and analyses the publication characteristics of the journal, the productivity, and collaboration of the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]