Information scientist — Wikipedia
A stub, arrived via Telegram 2026-08-23 immediately after information-science-wikipedia and ingested as its companion. Where that article describes the discipline, this one describes the job — and it is mostly the record of a job title going out of use.
What it establishes
- The role. An information scientist supplies focused information to scientific and technical research staff in industry, usually holding subject credentials of their own. The article calls the work "quite distinct from and complementary to that of a librarian." The term also covers researchers working in information-science, so it names two different things at once.
- The title is fading. End-user searching — people doing their own retrieval — plus convergence between the librarian and information-scientist roles have reduced its use. The replacements it names are information officer, information professional and information specialist.
- Institutional arc. The Institute of Information Scientists was founded in London, 1958 and set formal criteria for the field. In 2002 it merged with the Library Association to become CILIP — the profession the 1958 institute had defined as distinct from librarianship rejoined librarianship 44 years later. See cilip.
- Attribution of the term goes to Wm. Hovey Smith, in the later twentieth century.
- Seventeen names are listed as prominent information scientists, among them Marcia Bates, Eugene Garfield, Calvin Mooers, Tefko Saracevic and Brian Campbell Vickery. The list is bare — no contribution is attributed to anyone on it.
Tier
T2 — Wikipedia, but a thin one. Reliable for the two institutional dates (1958, 2002) and for the fact that the title is in decline. It carries no education requirements, no account of the work, and no evidence behind the name list, so nothing here should be built on it beyond what is written above. The attribution of the term to Wm. Hovey Smith is uncorroborated and worth checking before it is repeated.
Why it was kept anyway
The stub supplies the one thing its companion article does not: the occupational layer. information-science has a definition, subfields and a society; this says what happened to the people who did the work when the tools reached their users directly. That arc — specialist intermediary, then self-service, then the intermediary's institute folding into the profession it split from — is a live pattern for this corpus, and it is written up on information-scientist.
Related
information-scientist · information-science · cilip · information-science-wikipedia · information-retrieval · bibliometrics