Using E-Journals To Promote Information Worldwide

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Using E-Journals To Promote Information Worldwide

• Carol Tenopir
• University of Tennessee
• ctenopir_at_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
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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
and amount of readings from separate copies
use of personal subscriptions
Scientists appear to be reading from more
journalsat least one article per year from
approximately 26 journals, up from 13 in the late
1970s and 23 in 2000.
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Reading from Print and Digital
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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
58 45
21
Online Search
9 14
39
Colleagues
16 22
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Citations
6 13
16
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How Scientists Learned About Articles
Browsing Complete Journals
Online Searching by Topic
Electronic versions provide additional
functions (searching, citation linking) which
replace some browsing
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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 in 2001
• Each article gets an average of 300 downloads per
  year

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PubMed searches per month
Searches per month (Millions)
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
• Scientists value sources that allow them to make
  the best use of their time