Relationship between electronic journal downloads and citations in library consortia
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between electronic journal downloads and citations and whether online electronic resource usage can be adopted as an alternative to citation for evaluation of scholarly discourse.
Design/methodology/approach
A consolidated 16 publishers’ COUNTER usage data of UGC-Infonet members was collected from INFLIBNET Centre. The usage was meticulously filtered from UGC-subscribed journals and institutional subscriptions. The quantitative data were analysed to establish the relationship between download, impact factor (IF) and price. Multiple regression analysis was used to assess the influence of price and IF on usage and to predict the usage when they are known and the threshold for significance was set at p < 0.05.
Findings
There exists a relationship between IF and downloads of journals in UGC-Infonet. Journal IF and price significantly influence usage, where journal IF plays an important role in the intensity of the use. Also, the top 25 hottest downloaded papers were journals with IF; hence, no journal without IF featured in the top 25 most downloaded journals in the consortia. The relationship between the top 25 IF journals in the consortia and download is strong (r = 0.368537).
Originality/value
The only account that reports on the relationship between journal IFs and downloads for UGC-Infonet consortia. Also, the influence of usage behaviour with respect to citation and price of a journal.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr Jagdish Arora, Director, INFLIBNET and Dinesh Pradhan for providing the COUNTER compliant usage statistic for the year 2011 for providing us the data and Dr Valerie Dhar for her review and constructive suggestions to the paper without their co-operation this paper would not have made been possible.
Citation
Singson, M., Thiyagarajan, S. and Leeladharan, M. (2016), "Relationship between electronic journal downloads and citations in library consortia", Library Review, Vol. 65 No. 6/7, pp. 429-444. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-02-2016-0019
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited