Scholarly E-book Across Disciplines: Content Analysis of Usage Reports and Search Terms

This presentation was offered as part of the CUNY Library Assessment Conference, Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment, held at the City University of New York in June 2014

Scholarly E-Book Use across Disciplines: Content Analysis of Usage Reports and Search Terms

Data collected through COUNTER usage statistics and the LibQUAL+ service quality assessment survey tell us that faculty and students value access to the growing e-book collection at Columbia University Libraries (CUL). While the aggregate results indicate that e-book use continues to increase, usage rates are not uniform across disciplines. Given the highly diverse research needs of the university community, CUL is keen to understand scholarly e-book usage in various disciplines. In this study, we sought an innovative research method to understand e-book usage. This method utilizes data from two sources: readers’ e-book search terms harvested by Google Analytics; and requested e-book titles provided by the COUNTER e-book usage reports. The data was analyzed using NVivo, a qualitative analysis software, to examine popular scholarly e-book topics and the correlation between search and delivery. This paper is scheduled for publication in the 2014 CUNY Assessment Conference Proceedings

Is There Anything New under the Sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:9): A Local Report on the Research Practices of Scholars in Religion and Theology

This study of research support services for scholars in religion and theology was sponsored by Ithaka S&R and three professional associations (the American Theological Library Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Society of Biblical Literature). The Burke Library (Columbia University Libraries) was one of eighteen participating libraries. The overall goals of the study were (1) to understand the research habits and needs of scholars in the fields of religion and theology, and (2) to develop recommendations and strategies for libraries (the Burke Library in particular and ATLA libraries in general) that address these needs by either improving current services or developing new services

Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science

BACKGROUND: Researchers turn to citation tracking to find the most influential articles for a particular topic and to see how often their own published papers are cited. For years researchers looking for this type of information had only one resource to consult: the Web of Science from Thomson Scientific. In 2004 two competitors emerged – Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar from Google. The research reported here uses citation analysis in an observational study examining these three databases; comparing citation counts for articles from two disciplines (oncology and condensed matter physics) and two years (1993 and 2003) to test the hypothesis that the different scholarly publication coverage provided by the three search tools will lead to different citation counts from each. METHODS: Eleven journal titles with varying impact factors were selected from each discipline (oncology and condensed matter physics) using the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). All articles published in the selected titles were retrieved for the years 1993 and 2003, and a stratified random sample of articles was chosen, resulting in four sets of articles. During the week of November 7–12, 2005, the citation counts for each research article were extracted from the three sources. The actual citing references for a subset of the articles published in 2003 were also gathered from each of the three sources. RESULTS: For oncology 1993 Web of Science returned the highest average number of citations, 45.3. Scopus returned the highest average number of citations (8.9) for oncology 2003. Web of Science returned the highest number of citations for condensed matter physics 1993 and 2003 (22.5 and 3.9 respectively). The data showed a significant difference in the mean citation rates between all pairs of resources except between Google Scholar and Scopus for condensed matter physics 2003. For articles published in 2003 Google Scholar returned the largest amount of unique citing material for oncology and Web of Science returned the most for condensed matter physics. CONCLUSION: This study did not identify any one of these three resources as the answer to all citation tracking needs. Scopus showed strength in providing citing literature for current (2003) oncology articles, while Web of Science produced more citing material for 2003 and 1993 condensed matter physics, and 1993 oncology articles. All three tools returned some unique material. Our data indicate that the question of which tool provides the most complete set of citing literature may depend on the subject and publication year of a given article

A social network analysis of research collaboration in the economics community

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) offers the RePEc Author Service (RAS). It allows registrants to claim authorship of the research papers that are described in RePEc archives. The data from this service forms a highquality authorship database. We use this data to examine, as a practical example, how different network constructions affect the ranking of economists through authorship centrality. We use Spearman's rho test for evaluating the correlation between author centrality measures

Developing a predictive model of editor selectivity in a current awareness service of a large digital library

“NEP: New Economics Papers,” the current awareness service for the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) digital library, is made possible by volunteer editors who filter new additions to RePEc into subject-specific reports. The official purpose of current awareness service is to filter working papers by subject matter without any judgment of its academic quality. In this article binary logistic regression analysis estimates the probability of a paper being included in any of the subject reports as a function of a range of observable values. The analysis suggests that, contrary to their claims, editors use quality criteria: the series the paper is coming from and the reputation of the authors. The findings suggest that a current awareness service can issue quality signals

Metadata characteristics as predictors for editor selectivity in a current awareness service

RePEc is a large digital library for the economics community. “NEP: New Economics Papers” is a current awareness service for recent additions to RePEc. The service is run by volunteer editors. They filter new additions to RePEc into subject-specific reports. The intended purpose of this current awareness service is to filter papers by subject matter without any judgment of their academic quality. We use binary logistic regression analysis to estimate the probability of a paper being included in any of the subject reports as a function of a range of observable variables. Our analysis suggests that, contrary to their own claims, editors use quality criteria. These include the reputation of the series as well as the reputation of the authors. Our findings suggest that a current awareness service can be used as a first step of a peer-review process

Mapping Engagement: Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to Evaluate Engagement in the Assessment Program

In recent years, library performance measurement and assessment have seen expanding interest to provide evidence and context for library priority setting and decision-making. In order to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of services and collections, the number of library assessment activities has grown exponentially. The demand for assessment and evaluation expertise has led to full-time positions, and sometimes evaluation units, charged with sole responsibility for library assessment and planning. At CUL/IS, the Assessment Coordinator provides centralized leadership, coordination, and support for division-based and library-wide assessment activities. Taking a consultative approach, a single full-time librarian works with division staff members to carry out assessment projects. This approach is based on the premise that staff engagement in assessment endeavors is vital to the success of an organization-wide assessment program. However, the success of this approach has not yet been assessed quantitatively. The goal of this poster is to evaluate engagement in the Assessment Program and to understand how collaboration happens among professional staff of CUL/IS