Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to analyse the behaviour of the users of a package of electronic journals using the data of consumption per IP address.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper analyses the data of consumption at the University of Barcelona of 31 electronic journals of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2003. Data of sessions, articles downloaded and abstracts viewed were analysed.
Findings
Most of the consumption was concentrated at a few IP addresses, and most of the users made little use of the information available. There was found to be a greater dispersion of the consumption of electronic information than of information on paper. Finally, it was determined that the number of abstracts viewed is a good predictor of the number of regular users of a journal.
Originality/value
The paper offers new data on behaviour in the consumption of electronic information and presents a method for determining the number of regular users of a journal from the number of articles viewed.
Keywords
Citation
Borrego, A. and Urbano, C. (2007), "Analysis of the behaviour of the users of a package of electronic journals in the field of chemistry", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 63 No. 2, pp. 243-258. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410710737204
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Introduction
The ease with which it is currently possible to gather information on the behaviour of users in their use of electronic information resources has stimulated the interest of librarians in gathering statistical data for a variety of purposes.
Firstly, this is useful information for assessing the results obtained from the investment in electronic resources. On the one hand, the information provides arguments for the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of the new models of acquisition. On the other hand, it is useful for the management of the collection, because it makes it easier to obtain quantitative indicators for decision‐making. Simultaneously, these data can be used to justify increases in budgets for acquisition of electronic resources.
Statistics of use of electronic products and information on the type of use that is given to them are also of interest for the design of library web sites (which can, for example, give greater visibility to the least‐used products) and for the organisation of training activities for users (which can, for example, give priority to certain lines of action according to the observed consumption) (Duy, 2004, p. 112).
The data on the use of electronic products can also be used to carry out several types of comparative studies in areas such as the use of different electronic products in different institutions, the consumption of scientific information in different areas of knowledge, and how electronic publications are used in comparison with their printed forerunners.
Finally, the statistics of use are not only of interest to librarians, but also for other actors involved in the process of scientific communication: authors, publishers and members of editorial boards of publications (Peters, 2002, p. 42).
As an example of the interest in the analysis of the demand, use and reading of electronic databases and journals, Tenopir (2003) has made an exhaustive bibliographic review of over 200 studies on the use of electronic resources in libraries published between 1995 and 2003, which on the whole show the rapid acceptance of this type of products and services, and the existence of differences in their use according to variables such as the discipline and the age of the users.
More recently, Jamali et al. (2005) described the advantages and drawbacks of log analysis and reviewed the conclusions of over ten works that have used this methodology to study the use and users of electronic journals. In general, these jobs have offered contradictory conclusions on the volume of use of subscriptions through Big Deals, but they have shown a high degree of concentration in the use of titles and a preference for the pdf format rather than html. They have also provided interesting information on the pattern of behaviour of users and the increasing preference for searching to the detriment of browsing as a means of accessing information.
Some of the most exhaustive works carried out so far are those of the Ciber group, which recently analysed the results of a deep log analysis over six months of Blackwell Synergy (Nicholas et al., 2005a). This was a particularly broad analysis in terms of the number of journals, the number of users and the geographic and disciplinary diversity. These results were complemented additionally with those obtained from the analysis of the digital library of Emerald (Nicholas et al., 2005b). The results show the differences in behaviour between scientists according to their discipline and the variation in use between heavy and light users. In other works this group has analysed the degree of obsolescence of the information consulted according to the year of publication (Nicholas et al., 2005c) and the use of value‐added services (Nicholas et al., 2006).
Following this line of work, in previous studies we have analysed the temporal evolution of use, the dimension of the “consortial gain” (understood as the level of use of products that previously no library had subscribed in paper format) and the degree of dispersion of the use of four packages of journals contracted by the Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia (Urbano et al., 2004).
The great availability of data on the use of electronic journals – especially compared with that of journals on paper – has not, however, led to a perfect situation. Two basic problems arise in the use of statistics on use for the above purposes: the lack of standardisation in the process of collection and the difficulties in determining the value of a product according to its use.
With regard to the lack of standardisation, one must take into account that libraries are not now self‐sufficient in the process of collecting data on use of electronic resources, but depend on a second level: the publishers. Though a library may obtain information on how the users browse through the web site, or which resources are most popular, once users leave the website to connect to an electronic resource, the library loses track of them and depends on the supplier to provide statistics on how the users consume the products that the institution has licensed.
The problems stem from the fact that the different publishers do not observe uniform practices in collecting data on the use of electronic products and supplying it to libraries. The different publishers supply different data that are therefore not comparable, and it is not clear what is being offered due to the lack of definitions clarifying the specific meaning of the information supplied. Initiatives such as the COUNTER Project (www.projectcounter.org), that bring together publishers and librarians, must put an end to the coexistence of definitions, formats and periods of collection that are not very or not at all standardised, thus enormously hindering the real use of the data.
In addition to the problem of the lack of standardisation, there is a second drawback that limits the use of data on consumption of electronic resources for managing the collection: the difficulty in determining the value of a product according to its use. This problem is aggravated by the fact that we are attempting to interpret data on the use of an electronic product when we have little information on the use of its printed forerunner.
One must take into account that the raw data on use cannot be read directly, but, as stated by Hahn and Faulkner (2002, p. 217) they must be interpreted in some context and relativised according to the quality, content and price of the product. In this sense one must go beyond the simple data of use to attempt to obtain information on the value of the products as an aid in the process of managing the collection. The data of use say nothing of the quality of the resources or the type of use that is made of them (Duy, 2004, p. 126). Just as low figures of use may simply indicate that a resource is invisible to some of the users, high figures do not indicate that the users are necessarily satisfied with what is being offered to them. For example, an article may be downloaded many times because it is on the reading list for a subject, but this does not indicate that it is a more valuable text than one that is only viewed by a small group of specialists (Luther, 2001, p. 3).
Furthermore, one must take into account that the volume of consumption of scientific information varies from one discipline to another, that the data on use of a publication may be incomplete because an article may be available through alternative channels to online consultation of the journal (a paper subscription, a full‐text database, an author's website, etc.), and that the use of the journals may be affected by the time that they have been available, by the breadth of the electronic archive, by the design of the interface, etc.
Finally, the data on use offered by some publishers say little on the use that is made of their products. Most publishers offer quantitative data on consumption by titles, but rarely incorporate information on, for example, the paths followed by users to reach the products or how they browse through the different options, and it is difficult to make a thorough study of the individualised behaviour of users who are concealed behind aggregate statistics.
One of the strategies for overcoming this limitation is to consider the data of consumption by IP address to be representative of the behaviour of individualised users, though this is an equivalence that does not always hold. In this line, Davis and Solla (2003) made an analysis at IP level of the data on consumption of 29 journals of the American Chemical Society (ACS) during a period of three months in order to draw inferences on the behaviour of the users. Later, Davis (2004a) analysed the referral of URLs to ACS journals in order to find out the ways in which users accessed journals. More recently, he analysed the consumption of titles of HighWire in 16 institutions in 2003 in order to confirm the existence of a predictive relationship between the number of article downloads and the number of users (Davis, 2004b).
This work analyses the data on use by IP address of 31 journals of the ACS at the University of Barcelona in 2003. It analyses the data of sessions, articles downloaded and abstracts viewed. This study has two aims. Firstly, it analyses the use of the package in order to obtain information on the behaviour of the users – dispersion in the consumption of individuals and titles, preferences for the use of the pdf and html formats, differences in the consumption of full‐text articles and abstracts, etc. It also aims to determine whether the results obtained coincide with or differ from those obtained in other works, with the added value that the data are from a geographical area different to the habitual one, in which no studies of this type have been made previously. Most works on consumption of scientific information based on log analysis have been made in the Anglo‐Saxon area and very few have been made in other contexts, with a few exceptions such as Taiwan (Ke et al., 2002) and Italy (Gargiulo, 2003).
The results show that a minority of users consume a great amount of information and that most of the users make little use of the titles. A greater dispersion of the consumption of electronic information than that existing in the paper world is also observed. Finally, it is determined that the consumption of abstracts may be a good indicator of the number of regular users of a journal.
Methodology
This study analyses the data supplied by the publisher on the use of 31 journals of the ACS at the University of Barcelona in 2003. The list of journals can be found at: http://pubs.acs.org/about.html. The publisher offers the libraries subscribing to its publications data on use by title and by IP address of all the journals and of the ACS Journal Archives, which include the articles published from the first number of a publication to a given date. The list of journals included in the ACS Journal Archives and the period covered for each title can be found at http://pubs.acs.org/archives/. Thus, given that it is not strictly a title, to carry out this study the data of user sessions (SES), articles downloaded (FTD) and abstracts viewed (ABS) corresponding to the ACS Journal Archives were eliminated.
The population of potential users of the set of titles comprises the 4,500 lecturers and researchers and 63,000 students of the University of Barcelona. However, due to the specialisation of the package of journals analysed, it is to be assumed that its main target users are the lecturers, researchers and students of the Faculty of Chemistry, which comprises almost 250 lecturers and researchers belonging to 29 research groups assigned to the Faculty, in addition to 2,000 students. They also include students of chemistry subjects on other degree courses such as Biology, Geology, Medicine or Pharmacy.
For each journal we have the data of user sessions, articles downloaded (in html or pdf format) and abstracts viewed broken down by IP addresses. As stated above, in this study we considered each IP address to be equivalent to a user, though they are not equivalent concepts. In fact, an IP address represents a single computer, so sometimes – especially in the case of computer classrooms, libraries or proxy servers – the IP addresses conceal multiple users.
Log analysis offers important advantages for analysis of use and analysis of the characteristics of electronic journal users. As stated by Jamali et al. (2005), it is mainly a method for gathering data automatically, non‐intrusively and without filters. However, it also has some drawbacks. Firstly, as stated above, it is difficult to identify the users, because an IP address need not correspond to a single user. However, for the period in which the data were obtained, the computers of the University used static IP addresses, thus avoiding at least the distortions produced by dynamic addresses assigned by DHCP, which means that users continually change their IP address and that two different users share an IP address at different times. One must also bear in mind the existence of a proxy server that represents the aggregate consumption of a set of users who can also consult information from IP individual addresses. This problem was considered, for example, in a study by Ke et al. (2002, p. 269) on search processes in the ScienceDirect package of journals. The fact that almost half of the full‐text views were made from the 100 most active IP addresses showed that many users were concealed behind a proxy. Finally, one must bear in mind the difficulty of correctly measuring the use made through the cache options of browsers.
Results
Sessions
In 2003, 1,122 IP addresses accounted for 11,767 sessions. After eliminating the 52 IP addresses that only consulted the ACS Journal Archives and the 1,896 sessions of consultation of the Archives, we were left with 1,070 IP addresses on which 9,871 user sessions were performed.
Table I shows the existence of a group of heavy users who are responsible for a large part of the consumption. Thus, 25 single IP addresses (2.34 per cent of the “users”) accounted for 20 per cent of the sessions and 26.36 per cent of the IPs accounted for 80 per cent of the sessions. On average each IP address was used for 9.23 sessions (SD=17.00).
This concentration of consumption in a few IPs indicates that a great number of users make a very limited use of the available information. Table II shows that from almost a third of the IP addresses (31.40 per cent) only one session was opened during the year and 80 per cent of the “users” performed a maximum of twelve sessions.
Consumption of articles
In 2003, 1,122 IP addresses accounted for the download of 82,007 articles of publications of the ACS. After eliminating the 21,460 articles corresponding to the ACS Journal Archives and the 70 IP addresses that only downloaded articles from the Archives, we were left with 1,052 addresses that accounted for the download of 60,547 articles from 31 different journals: 58,737 (97.01 per cent) in pdf format and 1,810 (2.99 per cent) in html format.
This preference for the pdf format, apparently because it is friendlier for printing and saving the files, was also observed in other works reviewed by Jamali et al. (2005, p. 565). More recently, in their study on the use of the journals of Blackwell Synergy, Nicholas et al. (2005a, p. 253) found that two thirds of the articles were viewed in pdf and one third in html (Nicholas et al., 2005a, p. 253).
In the case of the articles, the concentration of use was even greater than that for the sessions. Table III shows that five single IP addresses (0.48 per cent of the “users”) accounted for 20 per cent of the article downloads and 14.16 per cent of the IP addresses accounted for 80 per cent of the downloads.
In this case too, a large number of users make a very limited use of the available information. Of the IP addresses, 22.81 per cent only downloaded one or two articles during the year and 56.75 per cent downloaded ten or fewer. The fact that these percentages are lower than those found by Davis and Solla (2003, p. 1065), who reported 38 per cent of users downloading 1 or 2 articles, may be explained by the fact that their period of data collection was only three months, compared with the full year analysed in this work.
This low consumption of information in many of the sessions was also reported by Nicholas et al. (2005a, p. 258) who, in their analysis of the consumption of Blackwell Synergy, found that in two thirds of the sessions only 1‐3 items were viewed (see Table IV).
Consumption of abstracts
The consumption of abstracts during this period was far more limited: 258 users viewed 1,422 abstracts of 29 journals, for two of which no abstracts were viewed. From these figures we eliminated 12 abstracts of the ACS Journal Archives and one user who only viewed abstracts of the Archives. This left 257 users who viewed 1,410 abstracts of 29 journals.
Over half the users viewed only one or two abstracts during the year (Table V). However, the dispersion in the use of the abstracts was greater than that of the consumption of articles, as can be seen from a comparison of Tables III and V. Whereas 50 per cent of the articles were downloaded from 4.09 per cent of the IP addresses, the same percentage of abstracts were viewed from 7.39 per cent of the IP addresses. Similarly, 80 per cent of the articles were downloaded from 14.16 per cent of the IP addresses, whereas the same percentage of abstracts were viewed from 32.30 per cent of the IP addresses (see Table VI).
The low use of the abstracts suggests that the users prefer to consult the full text directly in order to decide on the relevance of the articles, that the users do not understand the purpose of abstracts, or that the users previously consult bibliographic databases, so when they reach an article they have already made a decision on its use.
It is curious that the correlation between the number of articles and abstracts viewed by each user is not very strong, even limiting the analysis to the 239 users who both downloaded articles and viewed abstracts in 2003 (Pearson=0.56). This could indicate that the users who download articles and those who view abstracts are not the same.
Indeed, if we limit the analysis to these 239 users, we observe, for example, that the 18 most active users in downloading abstracts (responsible for half of the abstract views) are only responsible for 37 per cent of the FTDs.
Consumption of titles
Most of the users not only open few sessions and view few articles and abstracts, but they also do so for a low number of titles. As is shown in Tables VII and VIII, from over half of the IP addresses (57.51 per cent) only articles of 1 or 2 titles were downloaded and from two thirds of the IP addresses (66.54 per cent) only abstracts of one journal were viewed.
Dispersion in the use
Tables IX and X show the dispersion in the use of articles and abstracts in relation to all the journals of the ACS. In the case of the articles, it is observed that 35 per cent of the journals (11 publications) account for just over 80 per cent of the downloads of articles. In the case of the abstracts viewed we find a slightly higher concentration of the consumption, with a ratio of approximately 30/80.
The distribution by titles observed in the consumption of articles corresponds to Bradford's Law (1:n:n2), with a core of 2 journals from which 21,986 articles were downloaded (36.31 per cent of the total of 60,547 FTDs), 5 journals from which 19,243 articles were downloaded (31.78 per cent) and 26 journals from which 19,243 articles were downloaded (31.78 per cent), as shown in Figure 1.
In the case of abstracts a similar distribution was observed (Figure 2), with 1 journal from which 41.84 per cent of the abstracts were viewed, 5 journals from which 32.41 per cent were viewed and 23 journals from which the remaining 25.74 per cent were viewed.
It should be noted that there is a strong correlation between the number of articles and abstracts of each title downloaded (Pearson=0.94), so the rankings of titles with most articles downloaded and most abstracts viewed are very similar, with the same journals occupying similar positions in both classifications.
Users per title
Due to this concentration of article downloads and abstracts viewed in a relatively small number of titles, it was to be expected that, as shown in Tables XI and XII, most of the titles had a small number of users with regard to both article downloads and abstracts viewed. Over the half the titles (54.84 per cent) received article downloads from fewer than 100 IP addresses out of a total of 1,052 “users”. Only two titles had over 300 “users”: Biochemistry (358) and the Journal of the American Chemical Society (403). Furthermore, during this same period, over half the titles (51.61 per cent) had fewer than 10 users viewing some of their abstracts, with two titles receiving no view of this type. The only title with over 50 users of its abstracts was, once again, the Journal of the American Chemical Society (80).
Users of a single title
During the year 39.92 per cent of the users only downloaded articles of a single title (Table VII). These users downloaded a total of 1,624 articles (2.68 per cent of the total of 60,547 downloads). As can be seen in Figure 1, the proportion is very similar for all the journals except two: Biochemistry and the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, which had a very significant number of users who only consulted these titles and made a fairly considerable use of the publication. This observation was also made by Davis and Solla (2003, p. 1066) in their work. In these two cases, the users of a single title downloaded 10.03 and 12.28 per cent of all the FTDs of the journal. The reason for this would be that these journals are of interest to researchers of other areas of knowledge outside the field of chemistry, who only consult these two publications of the ACS, but not the rest (see Figure 3).
Furthermore, 66.54 per cent of the users only viewed abstracts of a single title during the year. These users viewed 24.40 per cent of all the abstracts viewed. As can be seen in the graph, once again the proportion is very similar for all the journals except the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In this case, the users who only consulted this title viewed 17.68 per cent of the abstracts of the publication that were viewed. This fits very well with the statement by Davis and Solla (2003, p. 1067) that “the function of JACS as a multi‐disciplinary browsing journal for chemists appears to hold online as it does in print” (see Figure 4).
Estimation of the number of users of a title from the number of articles downloaded and abstracts viewed
According to Davis and Solla (2003, p. 1065) and Davis (2004a), there is a very strong relationship between the number of articles downloaded and the number of users of a journal, so the number of article downloads could be used as a predictor of the number of users of a title. In our case, we have found a certain linear relationship between the number of articles downloaded and the number of users of each title (Rsq=0.80), albeit lower than that described by Davis and Solla (Rsq=0.92). The graph shows the linear regression straight line of this relationship. The number of FTDs was taken as the independent variable and the number of users as the dependent one. The regression straight‐line equation would be: Y=−2.34 + 3.41 X (see Figure 5).
The relationship between the number of abstracts viewed and the number of users of a title is even stronger. If we calculate the regression straight line between these two variables, we obtain the graph in Figure 4 (Rsq=0.89). The number of ABS was taken as the independent variable and the number of users as the dependent one. The regression straight‐line equation would be: Y=4.52 + 0.20 X (see Figure 6).
Other possible correlations have been suggested by other researchers, such as Nicholas et al. (2005a, p. 259), who state that “there is also a strong relationship between the use of TOCs and the downloading of full text articles”.
Discussion and conclusions
Log analysis offers very interesting information about the consumption of electronic products that is useful for managing digital libraries: acquisitions, organisation of the resources, marketing, etc.
In spite of the problems inherent in the use of this methodology – associated with the inability to establish an exact correspondence between an IP address and a user and the effects of proxies and cache options – the results obtained by analysing the consumption of a package of chemical e‐journals at the University of Barcelona has provided the opportunity to better understand users' behaviour as they consume e‐journals in this institution and to establish that this behaviour does not vary significantly from that observed by studies undertaken in other geographical contexts.
The consumption of information is concentrated in a small group of IP addresses
The results obtained show that a small group of IP addresses are responsible for most of the sessions, article downloads and viewings of abstracts. Furthermore, a large number of users consult the package of journals to locate a few specific articles. As to the format of the articles, users express a clear preference for pdf over html.
The lower consumption of abstracts than articles shows that many articles are consulted without a previous viewing of the abstract. This suggests that the abstracts are not used to decide whether or not to consult an article. The users reach the publication via a bibliographic reference and have already decided to download the article.
However, the fact that the abstracts are not used by many users as a criterion for deciding which articles to consult does not mean that the abstracts are not useful for browsing in order to keep up‐to‐date on new works that are published. This is shown by the fact that the journal with most users of abstracts is the Journal of the American Chemical Society. This is also the title with the greatest number of users who only consult abstracts of a single publication.
The dispersion is greater in the use of electronic information than in the use of information on paper
The data collected allow one to conclude that in the electronic world there is a greater dispersion in the consumption between the titles than in the paper world. If the canonical relation in the printed world indicated that 80 per cent of the requests corresponded to 20 per cent of the titles, in the electronic world this percentage has risen to around 35 per cent. This coincides closely with the results observed previously (Sanville, 2001; Urbano et al., 2004) and reinforces the idea of a freer, more exploratory, and often more accidental consumption of the collections (Nicholas et al., 2004), in which the participation of students can cause a considerable dispersion of use.
In the case of abstract usage, the degree of concentration is slightly higher than in that of articles (80/30). This discrepancy could be explained by the fact that the abstracts are used for browsing in order to allow readers to keep up‐to‐date with new findings in their subject area, by consulting a more reduced number of titles. In this respect the large number of users that consult only the abstracts of a multi‐disciplinary browsing journal such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society is significant.
The number of abstracts viewed is a good predictor of the number of regular users of a title
Though previous studies have proposed the number of articles downloaded as an indicator of the number of users of the package, the data of our study show that the number of abstracts viewed may also be a reliable indicator.
The data collected show that there is a strong correlation between the number of articles downloaded and abstracts viewed of a title, so that the rankings of titles by articles downloaded and abstracts viewed are practically identical. However, the correlation between the number of articles downloaded and abstracts viewed per user is quite low, from which it is deduced that the users who download articles and view abstracts are not the same. On this point, one must take into account that the figures of article downloads may be influenced by accidental factors – such as the inclusion of an article in the reading list for a subject – that may arbitrarily increase the number of downloads for a journal. The figures of abstracts viewed do not show this bias, so it may be a better indicator of the general behaviour of the population of regular users. The consumers of abstracts would represent a stable community of habitual users of the journals, representative of the real and continued use of the subscribed titles. On the other hand, the figures of articles downloaded include the presence of occasional users of the titles, who in many cases make sporadic use of the publications. Despite the significantly lower figures of consumption of abstracts than articles, the greater dispersion by IP addresses in the consultation of abstracts (80/32) than that of articles (80/14) would reinforce this interpretation.
Further research
With the aim of verifying the results obtained in this study, it is necessary for the analysis to be replicated with broader sets of journals stretching across a more varied subject range. At the same time, it would prove interesting to verify the existence of other possible types of relations, such as those that might exist between the regular use and the viewing of tables of contents derived from browsing activities.
Additionally, it will be necessary to supplement the results obtained from log analysis with those obtained through other methods, such as surveys and direct interviews with the users. This would permit discovering the reasons for their behaviour and for establishing which variables affect the use of e‐journals. Currently a study of this type is being carried out.
Corresponding author
Angel Borrego can be contacted at: [email protected]
References
Davis, P.M. (2004a), “Information seeking behaviour of chemists: a transaction log analysis of referral URLs”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 55 No. 4, pp. 326‐32.
Davis, P.M. (2004b), “For electronic journals, total downloads can predict number of users”, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 379‐92.
Davis, P.M. and Solla, L.R. (2003), “An IP‐level analysis of usage statistics for electronic journals in chemistry: making inferences about user behavior”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 54 No. 10, pp. 1062‐8.
Duy, J. (2004), “Usage data: issues and challenges for electronic resource collection management”, in Fowler, D.C. (Ed.), E‐serials Collection Management: Transitions, Trends, and Technicalities, Haworth Information Press, New York, NY.
Gargiulo, P. (2003), “Electronic journals and users: the CIBER experience in Italy”, Serials, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 193‐298.
Hahn, K.L. and Faulkner, L.A. (2002), “Evaluative usage‐based metrics for the selection of e‐journals”, College & Research Libraries, Vol. 63 No. 3, pp. 215‐27.
Jamali, H.R., Nicholas, D. and Huntington, P. (2005), “The use and users of scholarly e‐journals: a review of log analysis studies”, Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 57 No. 6, pp. 554‐71.
Ke, H., Kwakkelaar, R., Tai, Y. and Chen, L. (2002), “Exploring behavior of E‐journal users in science and technology: transaction log analysis of Elsevier's ScienceDirect OnSite in Taiwan”, Library and Information Science Research, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 265‐91.
Luther, J. (2001), White Paper on Electronic Journal Usage Statistics, 2nd ed., Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, DC, available at: www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub94/pub94.pdf (accessed March 29, 2005).
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P. and Watkinson, A. (2005a), “Scholarly journal usage: the results of deep log analysis”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 2, pp. 248‐80.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Watkinson, A. and Jamali, H.R. (2005b), “The users of digital scholarly journals and their information seeking behaviour: what usage data and deep log analysis can disclose”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, available at: http://ciber.soi.city.ac.uk/newarticle_bridging_jasist.doc (accessed December 12, 2005).
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Dobrowolski, T., Rowlands, I., Jamali, H.R. and Polydoratou, P. (2005c), “Revisiting ‘obsolescence’ and journal article ‘decay’ through usage data: an analysis of digital journal use by year of publication”, Information Processing and Management, Vol. 41 No. 6, pp. 1441‐61.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Williams, P. and Dobrowolski, T. (2004), “Re‐appraising information seeking behaviour in a digital environment: Bouncers, checkers, returnees and the like”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 60 No. 1, pp. 24‐43.
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P., Monopoli, M. and Watkinson, A. (2006), “Engaging with scholarly digital libraries (publisher platforms): the extent to which ‘added‐value’ functions are used”, Information Processing and Management, Vol. 42 No. 3, pp. 826‐42.
Peters, T.A. (2002), “What's the use? The value of e‐resource usage statistics”, New Library World, Vol. 103 Nos 1172/1173, pp. 39‐47.
Sanville, T.J. (2001), “A method out of the madness: OhioLink's collaborative response to the serial crisis: four years later progress report”, Serials, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 163‐77.
Tenopir, C. (2003), Use and Users of Electronic Library Resources: An Overview and Analysis of Recent Research Studies, Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, DC, available at: www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub120/pub120.pdf (accessed December 12, 2005).
Urbano, C., Anglada, L., Borrego, A., Cantos, C., Cosculluela, A. and Comellas, N. (2004), “The use of consortially purchased electronic journals by the CBUC (2000‐2003)”, D‐Lib Magazine, Vol. 10 No. 6, available at: www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/anglada/06anglada.html (accessed March 29, 2005).
Further Reading
Nicholas, D., Huntington, P. and Watkinson, A. (2003), “Digital journals, Big Deals and online searching behaviour: a pilot study”, Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives, Vol. 55 Nos 1/2, pp. 84‐109.