E-Journal Metrics: Exploring Disciplinary Differences

Abstract

Collection librarians have an ongoing need to align acquisition and retention decisions about library resources in order to provide the best possible outcomes for their users and accountability to administrators. In previous collection management research, we developed a decision-making blueprint by incorporating the relationships between the journals that our users downloaded and the journals that our faculty cited in their articles.

In this presentation, we take the next step by exploring the extent to which disciplinary differences exist in the relationships between the downloading of our subscribed journals and a) faculty decisions to author articles in these journals and b) the choices their external peers make as to whether or not to cite our faculty’s articles in these journals. Does the strength of the relationships vary by discipline? Do the social sciences / humanities differ from the physical or health sciences? Are there differences between similar disciplines such as the physical and health sciences, or within disciplines, such as nursing to medicine, or are they alike enough for one formula to suffice? Together, these metrics will help fine tune our sense, at a disciplinary level, of the value that our users assign to our collection through their decisions about which journal articles to download, read, and cite.