Our LIS PhD program is relatively small: the first graduate, Michael Shepherd, completed in 1978. Since then, 99 students have successfully defended their theses, the two most recent in April 2025. Our graduates have shown strengths in a number of research areas. The first chronologically, which developed under the leadership of Jean Tague-Sutcliffe and her early graduates, produced scholars such as Mike Shepherd, Mike Nelson, Dietmar Wolfram, Isola Ajiferuke, Liwen Vaughan, Elaine Toms, and J. Stephen Downie, who have shaped informetrics and information retrieval scholarship for a generation. A second cluster of graduates reflects Western’s early leadership in what was initially known as information needs, seeking and use. A strong team of supervisors including Catherine Ross, Gillian Michell, Roma Harris, and Gloria Leckie contributed to the formation of some of the most important voices in information behaviour/practices scholarship today. This group includes Patricia Dewdney, Clara Chu, Karen Fisher, Lisa Given, Heidi Julien, Elisabeth Davies, Tiffany Veinot, Tami Oliphant, Paulette Rothbauer, Nicole Dalmer, Roger Chabot, and Nafiz Shuva. Closely related are graduates in the scholarship of reading supervised by Catherine Ross and her graduates: Lynne McKechnie, Paulette Rothbauer, Lucia Cedeira Serantes, and Davin Helkenberg. Western PhD alumni are authors of the foundational texts in both information behaviour and reading. Information policy graduates include Dan Dorner, Siobhan Stevenson, Brendan Luyt, Wilhelm Peekhaus, and Michael McNally, and knowledge organization graduates include scholars like Margaret Kipp.

Our graduates have found employment at universities in Canada (Dalhousie: Bertrum MacDonald, Michael Shepherd; McGill, Jamshid Beheshti; Montréal, Anton Ninkov; Toronto: Juris Delevko, Siobhan Stevenson; Alberta: Tami Oliphant, Michael McNally; Guelph: Kim Martin); the U.S. (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Bryce Allen, Clara Chu, J. Stephen Downie; Kent State, Don Wicks; Old Dominion: Amber Matthews; Queen’s College: Nafiz Shuva; Syracuse, Heidi Julien; Washington: Karen Fisher; Wisconsin Milwaukee: Margaret Kipp, Wil Peekhaus, Dietmar Wolfram), Europe (Sheffield, UK: Elaine Toms; University College Dublin, Ireland: Crystal Fulton; Linneaus University, Sweden: Ahmad M. Kamal; University of Malta: Mark Kosciejew), Africa (Africa Regional Centre of Information Science, Ibadan, Nigeria: Mutawakilu Tiamiyu; Kenyatta University, Kenya: Charles Kamau Maina), Asia (PES University, Bengaluru, India: Ravichandra Rao; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore: Brendan Luyt) and Oceania (Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand: Dan Dorner; Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology: Lisa Given, Yimin Chen). Many listed here have contributed to several academic institutions, moving into leadership positions as their careers progressed. They have served as Directors of LIS programs, Associate Deans and Deans of Faculties, and have held senior leadership roles in their universities. Other graduates have pursued professional careers and continue to be active researchers (e.g., Alexandre Fortier, Library of Parliament; Natasha Gerolami, Laurentian University; Karen Nicholson, University of Guelph; Peggy Nzomo, Urbana-Champaign). A handful have remained at or returned to Western to supervise the next generation of LIS scholars.

Western alumni have contributed significantly to ASIS&T publications. A Scopus search from 1986 to 2024 shows that, together, Western’s LIS PhD graduates have contributed 214 papers in ASIS&T Proceedings or JASIS/&T and have been cited a total of 9708 times, an average of 45.4 citations per paper. In addition, there are a lot of familiar names in the lists of ASIS&T award winners.

Table 1: Western alumni winning ASIS&T awards

Figure 1 illustrates the total publication record of the 15 Western LIS PhD graduates with the highest Scopus publication records (Downie, J.S., Wolfram, D., Given, L.M., Julien, H., Wathen, C.N., Shepherd, M., Luyt, B., Toms, E.G., Beheshti, J., Vaughan, L., Veinot, T.C., Dilevko, J., Ajiferuke, I., Fisher, K.E. [n.b. does not include publications indexed under Pettigrew or Fisher-Pettigrew], MacDonald, B.H.).

A new generation of PhD supervisors, including some who supervise across our three PhD programs: LIS, Media Studies, and Health Information Science, has broadened the scope of our doctoral program to include new areas such as natural language processing, cross-language information retrieval, internet studies, artificial intelligence, and critical librarianship, resulting in a new ways that Western PhD graduates will shape the organization and the discipline. Just watch us!