the impact of the online knowledge library: its use and impact on the production of the portuguese...
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5th International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries
4 - 7 June 2013, "La Sapienza" University, Rome Italy
The impact of the Online Knowledge Library: its use and impact on the production of the Portuguese academic and scientific community (2000-2010)
Teresa Costa, Carlos Lopes and Francisco Vaz
• In recent years several initiatives have taken place to promote universal access to the Information and Knowledge Society
• In 2004 the Online Knowledge Library (b-on) was launched in Portugal. With it, it became easier to get access to full text international scientific publications.
• With almost ten years of existence it seems appropriate to:o evaluate the usefulness and availability of electronic collections provided
by b-on evaluating the real needs of users through the analysis of usage statistics,
o seek to achive the usefulness of this quantitative and qualitative increase of the electronic information has had at the level of the Portuguese scientific output between 2000 and 2010.
Beginning
• With the advent of the electronic resources the cooperation between libraries was reinforced with their association in consortia to negotiate better contracts.
• This practice was especially developed between academic libraries, since these Institutions are the ones with greater usage of the available electronic contents.
Portuguese consortium
With this study we present and analyse some statistical /bibliometrical indicators of the Portuguese Scientific output seeking to associate them with the emergence of the Portuguese consortium
As the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL, 2010) the analysis of resource usage is not significant if not in connection with the results, students learning and researchers production. The interest lies in measuring the impact of the library on their users.
• The objectives of this study are: o determine the usage that universities teachers and researchers make of
the online scientific information offered by b-on; o identify and characterize the scientific output of universities linking it
with the increased usage of b-on’s resources; o measure the level of relevance and the use of online sources; o and identify the scientific subject areas with major output as well as
main titles indexed in WoS with Portuguese affiliation.
Objectives
• We analysed:
o the usage of b-on resources by the public universities members of the consortium from 2004 to 2010 (we chose as sample the five universities with more downloads per FTE - full time equivalent).
o In addition to the usage data of the consortium, we used the Web of Science (WoS) from which we identified the articles indexed by the five Portuguese universities affiliated between 2000-2010.
o We identified the scientific production per subject area, international cooperation and scientific journals with the highest number of published articles, among others.
Methods
In 2010 b-on gave access to more than 19.000 journals, 18.000 e-books and 12.000 conference proceedings in full text, covering of the several scientific subject areas
Fig.1 - Annual evolution of the number of b-on’s titles (2004-2010)
Online Knowledge Library: contents
In terms of the use of resources b-on has been growing year by year, reaching in 2010 almost 7 millions of downloads.
Fig.2 - Evolution of downloads (2004-2010)
B-on’s downloads
The five public universities with more downloads per FTE are:
Table 1 - The five universities with more downloads/ FTE per year (2004-2010)
After the identification of the institutions with greater usage statistics, the search strategy consisted in the recovery of all articles indexed in WoS, where the affiliation was 'Portugal' (i.e., where the author’s institutional address was Portugal) between the years 2000 and 2010 originated from the five public universities.
Universities with more usage
The number of articles with Portuguese affiliation has gradually increased in recent years. We found:• 79.192 articles indexed in WoS, with at least one Portuguese author, published in the
years under analysis. • 40.413 have affiliation in at least one of the five universities considered in this study
(51%).
Fig.3 - Evolution of Portuguese scientific articles indexed in Web of Science (2000-2010)
The growth rate of the number of articles with Portuguese affiliation and from the five universities was more than 300% between 2000 and 2010.
Portuguese scientific articles indexed in WoS
The growth rate of the number of citations to Portuguese articles was of 415%, and the in the case of the five universities was of 500%.
Fig. 4 - Evolution of citations to scientific articles indexed in Web of Science (2000-2010)
Citations countThe increase of the number of citations is exponential.
International collaboration
The major international collaborations is with the USA and Spain
Fig.5 - International collaboration in research (2000-2010)
The top 5 research areas are the same for Portugal and for the universities in studie.• Chemistry, Physics and Engineering (representing 35% of total of
Portuguese articles in WoS between 2000 and 2010).
Top 5 research areas
Fig.6 - Top 5 research areas (2000-2010)
PublicationsIt is not surprising that English is the most used language to disseminate the national research outputs.
Title PT 5 UnivLecture Notes in Computer Science 740 428Materials Science Forum 497 312Physical Review D 496 357Allergy 424 8European Heart Journal 414 -Physics Letters B 251 170Journal of Physical Chemistry B 302 161
In our case it’s interesting that the first three titles are the same in both cases.
Fig. 7 - WoS indexed publications with more Portuguese articles (2000-2010)
• As anticipated we confirmed that the type of institution with more downloads are universities. These institutions are also the ones with more articles indexed in the WoS.
• We believe that the availability of electronic resources contributes to the higher productivity of universities.
• Intensive use of e-journals is a reliable indicator of future research success and has resulted in changes in the scientific communication model.
• Chemistry is the research subject are with more output, and the Portuguese Chemicals sector researchers show a clear preference for publication in international journals and believe this is reflected in the increased visibility of this area research.
• The general trend is to an increase of publications of Portuguese authors / researchers in scientific journals, although the percentage in the social sciences remains much lower than that of science and technology
Conclusions
