Closing the Information Gap in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Studies

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), also known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), has shifted from being a stigmatized topic on the fringes of scientific inquiry to a legitimate subject of scientific interest with a need for high quality, curated data, and rigorous scientific investigation. This paper presents a preliminary scoping review and analysis of scholarly literature related to UAP from 1967 until 2023, exploring a diverse range of research areas across disciplines to illustrate scholarly discourse about the topic. The paper focuses on characterizing papers published in recent years and notes that Library & Information Science is unrepresented in the current UAP literature. The paper also discusses how researchers across the iFields can contribute to UAP studies through inherent expertise such as data curation and data science as well as information behavior and information literacy, among others. The paper concludes by emphasizing that UAP Studies offer a rich intellectual realm for information science research, with the iFields well positioned to play a crucial role in supporting and engaging in the study of UAP.