Measuring Library Subscriptions to the availability of scholarly articles published by the academic and research community of the institution

Authors

Ishappa C. Bandi, BITS PilaniFollow

Date of this Version

Winter 11-27-2020

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Any research institution needs to analyze their research output in terms of journal articles in SCI or SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR) Indicator. It is also essential at the same time to understand the library subscription quality. In this article, an attempt has been made to map the faculty and research scholarly journal publications and the library E-journals subscription. The current year articles publications by the academic staff and research scholars indexed in the SCOPUS database have been analyzed based on the full-text availability. The sources from where the academic staff refer and cite would like to publish their research articles. It is vital from the library point of view to study bibliometric analysis on their users' needs from time to time by understanding the reading and referencing habits. It is effortless to subscribe to more resources, but it is challenging to use them for users' academic purposes. To know the usage pattern and develop a library subscription strategy where > 90% of the library budget was invested in subscribing to E-Journals, and online databases, the usage of these resources matters the most. Gone are the days when traditional methods like subscribe and wait for your user to use these resources. It is imperative to understand what they want instead of bombarding with what we have for them. The methodology used here is straightforward, the SCOPUS Indexed articles published by faculty members and research scholars of the institution were analyzed using full-text availability from the library subscriptions and from open access resources. The majority, 77% of the articles have full-text availability, of which 43% are from library resources and 24% are from Open Access journals. There are 23% of published articles indexed in SCOPUS do not available in full-text for and these sources are not part of the library subscriptions. Out of all types of documents, the majority, 69.70% published in the form of articles. Science Direct is the major source for academic staff to publish their articles, followed by Springer Nature, and the third-highest source of publication is Open Access resources.