CiteULike: timbrody's library [9 articles]

An IP-level analysis of usage statistics for electronic journals in chemistry: Making inferences about user behavior

Philip Davis — 2005-11-05T15:51:15-00:00

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 54, No. 11. (4 June 2003), pp. 1062-1068.

This study reports an analysis of American Chemical Society electronic journal downloads at Cornell University by individual IP addresses. While the majority of users (IPs) limited themselves to a small number of both journals and article downloads, a small minority of heavy users had a large effect on total journal downloads. There was a very strong relationship between the number of article downloads and the number of users, implying that a user-population can be estimated by just knowing the total use of a journal. Aggregate users (i.e. Library Proxy Server and public library computers) can be regarded as a sub-sample of the entire user population. Analysis of article downloads by format (PDF versus HTML) suggests that individuals are using the system like a networked photocopier, for the purposes of creating print-on-demand copies of articles.

Citation Generators: Generating Bibliographies for the Next Generation

Jane Kessler — 2005-08-01T12:24:33-00:00

The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof

Librarians are frequently consulted about proper citation formats and support the use of PC-based personal bibliographic citation management programs, such as EndNote, often used by faculty and graduate students. Recently, free or inexpensive Web-based tools have been developed that create citations and format bibliographies. An analysis of citations generated by these programs shows that they are as accurate as EndNote and offer some advantages to undergraduates, but that some knowledge of proper citation formats is necessary to use these programs effectively.

Toward alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation data

Johan Bollen — 2005-08-01T12:26:07-00:00

Information Processing & Management, Vol. 41, No. 6. (December 2005), pp. 1419-1440.

We generated networks of journal relationships from citation and download data, and determined journal impact rankings from these networks using a set of social network centrality metrics. The resulting journal impact rankings were compared to the ISI IF. Results indicate that, although social network metrics and ISI IF rankings deviate moderately for citation-based journal networks, they differ considerably for journal networks derived from download data. We believe the results represent a unique aspect of general journal impact that is not captured by the ISI IF. These results furthermore raise questions regarding the validity of the ISI IF as the sole assessment of journal impact, and suggest the possibility of devising impact metrics based on usage information in general.

Relation between online "hit counts" and subsequent citations: prospective study of research papers in the BMJ

Thomas Perneger — 2005-08-17T12:14:46-00:00

BMJ, Vol. 329, No. 7465. (4 September 2004), pp. 546-547.

Errors in citation statistics

2005-08-12T12:49:28-00:00

Nature, Vol. 415, No. 6868. (10 January 2002), pp. 101-101.

The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access[star, open]

Stevan Harnad — 2005-01-04T15:02:08-00:00

Serials Review, Vol. 30, No. 4. (2004), pp. 310-314.

The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users; hence, they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles Open Access (OA; i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the "golden" road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the "green" road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). Only 5% of journals are gold, but over 90% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10-20% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as the United Kingdom and the United States have recently recommended, and universities need to implement that mandate.

The impact of OAI-based search on access to research journal papers

Steve Hitchcock — 2005-08-12T06:58:09-00:00

Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community, Vol. 16, No. 3. (November 2003), pp. 255-260.

Intuitively, if a product is useful and has both a priced and a free version its total usage rate would be expected to be higher than if there is only a priced version. Evidence is emerging that this is true for online research journal papers. Authors need accessible online sites in which to deposit their published papers, and users need a means of discovering and evaluating those papers. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has now produced free software packages for building OAI-compliant institutional archives and OAI search services, including a citation-ranked search and impact discovery service. New data from this service shows that higher usage of free papers leads directly to a higher number of citations and thus greater research impact. Institutional archives need far more papers to be deposited, and one way of bringing this about is to implement institutional and national policies mandating the self-archiving of all funded research output in open access archives. This paper outlines why such policies are beneficial to researchers, their institutions, funders, and to research itself.

Worldwide use and impact of the NASA Astrophysics Data System digital library

Michael Kurtz — 2005-08-17T12:00:33-00:00

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 56, No. 1. (20 September 2004), pp. 36-45.

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), along with astronomy's journals and data centers (a collaboration dubbed URANIA), has developed a distributed online digital library which has become the dominant means by which astronomers search, access, and read their technical literature. Digital libraries permit the easy accumulation of a new type of bibliometric measure: the number of electronic accesses (<IMG SRC="/giflibrary/12/ldquo.gif" BORDER="0">reads<IMG SRC="/giflibrary/12/rdquo.gif" BORDER="0">) of individual articles. By combining data from the text, citation, and reference databases with data from the ADS readership logs we have been able to create second-order bibliometric operators, a customizable class of collaborative filters that permits substantially improved accuracy in literature queries. Using the ADS usage logs along with membership statistics from the International Astronomical Union and data on the population and gross domestic product (GDP), we have developed an accurate model for worldwide basic research where the number of scientists in a country is proportional to the GDP of that country, and the amount of basic research done by a country is proportional to the number of scientists in that country times that country's per capita GDP. We introduce the concept of utility time to measure the impact of the ADS/URANIA and the electronic astronomical library on astronomical research. We find that in 2002 it amounted to the equivalent of 736 full-time researchers, or $250 million, or the astronomical research done in France.

The bibliometric properties of article readership information

Michael Kurtz — 2005-08-17T11:59:37-00:00

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 56, No. 2. (20 September 2004), pp. 111-128.

Digital libraries such as the NASA Astrophysics Data System (Kurtz et al., 2005) permit the easy accumulation of a new type of bibliometric measure, the number of electronic accesses (<IMG SRC="/giflibrary/12/ldquo.gif" BORDER="0">reads<IMG SRC="/giflibrary/12/rdquo.gif" BORDER="0">) of individual articles. We explore various aspects of this new measure. We examine the obsolescence function as measured by actual reads and show that it can be well fit by the sum of four exponentials with very different time constants. We compare the obsolescence function as measured by readership with the obsolescence function as measured by citations. We find that the citation function is proportional to the sum of two of the components of the readership function. This proves that the normative theory of citation is true in the mean. We further examine in detail the similarities and differences among the citation rate, the readership rate, and the total citations for individual articles, and discuss some of the causes. Using the number of reads as a bibliometric measure for individuals, we introduce the read-cite diagram to provide a two-dimensional view of an individual's scientific productivity. We develop a simple model to account for an individual's reads and cites and use it to show that the position of a person in the read-cite diagram is a function of age, innate productivity, and work history. We show the age biases of both reads and cites and develop two new bibliometric measures which have substantially less age bias than citations: SumProd, a weighted sum of total citations and the readership rate, intended to show the total productivity of an individual; and Read10, the readership rate for articles published in the last 10 years, intended to show an individual's current productivity. We also discuss the effect of normalization (dividing by the number of authors on a paper) on these statistics. We apply SumProd and Read10 using new, nonparametric techniques to compare the quality of different astronomical research organizations.