Journal Use Reports: Efficient measurement of journal collections

 
Thomson Scientific
September 2006

How do you measure journal use and activity at your institution? Do you know where your institution's researchers are publishing? Which journals they're using? Who your most prolific authors are? And how many hours — or days — does it take for you and your staff to collect, compile, and analyze usage reports from all the publishers?

Journal Use Reports™ (JUR™) — built in partnership with top institutions worldwide — helps librarians and administrators get a complete picture of journal performance, use, and research activity at their institution. By combining journal usage data, journal citation metrics from Journal Citation Reports®, institutional publication data, and article-level data from Web of Science®, JUR is helping users make fully informed collection development and management decisions.

At the University of Chicago: Seeing the big picture

As with research institutions of all sizes across the globe, evaluating its libraries' holdings has been a constant challenge for information professionals at the world-class library system at the University of Chicago . "In the past, evaluating our holdings has been a very cumbersome process. Journal Use Reports unifies all of our previous evaluation methods," said Jim Mouw, Assistant Director for Technical and Electronic Services. "Essentially, Journal Use Reports creates a matrix of information — qualitative and quantitative — that our university can use to truly evaluate our holdings.

"Evaluating holdings becomes more relevant and applicable when the evaluator can see who is citing the journals and not just how often they are being cited. Journal Use Reports automatically generates these hard-to-come-by statistics."

At the University of Melbourne: Maximizing the impact factor

Journal Use Reports is providing the tools that help this leading research university implement its new strategic plan — as well as streamline its research evaluation and collection management processes.

A major element of the "Growing Esteem" strategic plan is to refocus the university's research to be more impactful, by bringing its world-class research to a wider, more global audience.

"The 'Growing Esteem' strategic plan changes the nature of our university's collections," said Shirley Sullivan, Electronic Information Coordinator at the University of Melbourne . "And Journal Use Reports will be a key tool in refocusing our holdings. It provides the hard data that we need to make proper, quantitative analyses of our collections."

Lynne Horwood, Research Consultant to the University's postgraduate community, adds: "Our academics must publish a certain amount of research in journals with a high impact factor, and their results are shared with our government department and our vice-chancellor."

Journal Use Reports, Sullivan said, streamlines this reporting process.

"Before Journal Use Reports, assessment could only be done on an individual basis with the researchers compiling their information themselves. Journal Use Reports takes the evaluative responsibility off of our researchers, freeing up more time for their studies and streamlining the assessment process. No other product offers this sort of capability. It's fantastic. You can do so much with it."

At the University of Michigan: A new way to evaluate quality

Before Journal Use Reports, Mark Sandler, Chief Development Officer for the University of Michigan Libraries*, and his team had difficulty assessing their holdings by any means other than raw numbers. Quantitative analysis, Sandler said, doesn't always do the trick.

"Many of the journals we buy are incredibly specialized — they have very specific titles and concepts, and focus on very specific areas of research. That's the nature of research publications. When we look at the usage of some of these specialized journals, we may see only a handful of users from our institution reading them, and even fewer publishing in them."

In the past, Sandler notes, this may have been cause to stop receiving a journal all together. But with Journal Use Reports , analysis takes on a whole new form.

"What Journal Use Reports tells is how important a journal is among the research peers working in that area — not just to an audience of undergraduates or the general public. It also tells us who from our faculty is using the journal, and who from our faculty is publishing in the journal.

A specialized journal may only receive a handful of hits, but if all those hits reflect local scholarship and publishing, it needs to be evaluated under a different set of standards. Those are 'quality' hits, and that journal is a keeper."

"Journal Use Reports takes us beyond the notion of raw, undifferentiated hits, and allows us to see the value of the research program to our faculty and students. It takes us to a whole new level of ability to analyze our collections."

* Since the preparation of this article, Mark Sandler has left the University of Michigan

Additional information

More about how JUR customers are using this new collections assessment and management tool — and learn more about JUR capabilities via fact sheets, tutorials, and training sessions.