The Use and Value of Scientific Journals: Impact on Practitioners

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The Use and Value of Scientific Journals
Impact on Practitioners

• Carol Tenopir
• ctenopir_at_utk.edu
• University of Tennessee

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Growth of Scholarly Journals
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Growth of Internet Domains
Source Internet Software Consortium Domain
Survey available at lthttp//www.isc.org/ds/hosts
.htmlgt
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Myths

• Scholarly journals are not read
• There are too many journals
• Journals are only for authors
• Scientists know information before it appears in
  a journal
• Electronic journals will completely replace print

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Average Number of Scholarly Article Readings Per
Year
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Time Spent Reading
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Facts Behind the Myths

• Growth of journal literature is correlated with
  the number of scientists
• 1 article per 10 scientists
• 70 of all readings are done by non-academicians

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Growth of...
Scholarly Journals
Internet Domains
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PubMed

• A month worth of searches in PubMed equaled a
  year of MEDLINE searches (about 7.6 million)
• Today, the number of PubMed searches ranges from
  500,000 to over one million per day

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arXiv.org

• Connections to LANLs arXiv.org reached 180,000
  per day in February 2001
• Each article gets an average of 300 downloads per
  year

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• Andrew Odlyzkos 1995 article Tragic Loss or
  Good Riddance? still gets an average of 175
  downloads per month.

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Average Cost Per TitleScience Journals 1996-2000
7.7
6.9
7.1
11.9
9.7
11.3
11.0
11.4
Source Library Journal, April 15, 2000
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Average Number of Personal Subscriptions to
Scholarly Journals
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Proportion of Readings of Scholarly Scientific
Articles
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Library Owning vs.Borrowing Article Copies
Institutional Subscriptions
Break-Even Point
ILL/Document Delivery
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What does this mean for libraries?

• Continue to subsidize access to journals
• Provide them in either print or electronic form
• Think in terms of some subscriptions
• Save the reader's time by providing access and
  links to high quality journal literature
• Think in terms of economies of scale (consortia)
  and saving readers' time