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Using E-Journals To Promote Information

Carol TenopirUniversity of Tennessee

ctenopir@utk.edu

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How Electronic Publishing is Changing Access to Information

1) Scientists read more in not much more time

2) Scientists read from a greater variety of sources

3) Readers use many ways to locate information

4) More readers, more readings, more citations

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1. Scientists read more in not much more time

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Average Time Spent and Number of Articles Read Per Year Per Scientist

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

1977 1978-1983

1984 1985-1989

1990-1993

1994-1998

2000-2001

Number ReadHours Spent

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Scholarly Article Reading

Work Field Articles Reading (Per Year)

Time Spent (Hours)

Time Per Article (Min)

University Medical Faculty

~322 118 22

Chemists ~276 198 43

Physicists ~204 153 45

Engineers ~72 97 81

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Differences Among Work Places and Work Fields

• University faculty read more than non-faculty

• Medical faculty and practitioners read more articles than most (but spend less time per article)

• Engineers read fewer articles (but spend more time)

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2. Scientists read from a greater variety of sources

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Sources of Readings

Scientists appear to be reading frommore journals—at least one article peryear from approximately 26 journals, upfrom 13 in the late 1970s and 23 in 2000.

% and amount of readings from separate copies

use of personal subscriptions

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Reading from Print and Digital

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

AAS ORNL UTK

Paper

Other e-

E-prints

E-journals

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3. Readers use many ways to locate information

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How Scientists Learned About Articles

Early Evolving Advanced

Browsing

Online Search

Citations

Colleagues

58% 45% 21%

16% 22% 21%

6% 13% 16%

9% 14% 39%

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Age of Articles Read from Digital Media

Early (1990-1994)

65.2%

14.5%

12.5%

7.7%

1 year 2 years 3-10 years >10 years

Evolving (2000-2002)

68.8%

10.2%

5.2%

15.8%

Advanced (2001-present)

63.8%9.9%

19.0%

7.3%

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How Scientists Learned About Articles

Electronic versions provide additional functions (searching, citation linking) which replace some browsing

Online Searching by Topic

Browsing Complete Journals

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Use and Users of Electronic Library Resources: An Overview and Analysis of Recent Research Studies. Tenopir, Carol www.clir.org/pub/reports/pub120/pub120.pdf

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4. More readers, more readings, more citations

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Los Alamos/Cornell arXiv.org

• Connections reached 200,000 per day in May 2001

• 35,000 new papers expected in 2001

• Each article gets an average of 300 downloads per year

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PubMed searches per month

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

1998 1999 2002

Sea

rche

s pe

r m

onth

(M

illio

ns)

Year searches were conducted

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Steve Lawrence, “Online or Invisible?” Nature, v.411 n.6837: p.521, 2001.

www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/

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Highly cited and recent articles are more likely to be freely available on the web

www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/

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The percentage increase for the average number of citations to online vs. offline

articles

www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/

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Summary of What Has Changed

• Scientists read more

• Scientists read from a greater variety of sources

• Freely available online articles are read and cited more

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Some Things Do Not Change:

• Scientists value high quality information

• Scientists must read more in not much more time

• Scientist read both current and older articles and read for many reasons

• Scientists value sources that allow them to make the best use of their time