Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Abstract
With academic journals widely published and distributed online, the paper usage data has been a focus not only by publishers, but also by many researchers, especially librarians. The main reason for this motivation is that this data is considered as a measure of interest in published research and that possible references to the paper in the future have been used as the first predictive tool. The aim of this study is to examine whether there is a relationship between paper usage data and citation counts for Library Philosophy and Practice between 2005 and 2020, taking into account the number of citations that papers cited ten and over in the Scopus database have received in the Google Scholar (GS) database at the same time. As a result of the analysis, the correlations between download and citation counts from the Scopus database and the GS database were determined to be statistically significant positive (rS=0.261 and rP=0.310; rS=0.636 and rP=0.356; p<0.01), respectively. Similarly, there was a positive correlation between citations in the Scopus database and citations in the GS database (rS=0.581 and rP=0.812; p<0.01). In the meanwhile, taking into consideration the papers' single-author and multi-author statuses; it was observed that single-author papers received more citations on average in the Scopus and GS databases, but the difference between groups was not statistically significant (p>0.05). The findings were compared with the studies in the literature and evaluations were made about what can be done for future studies.
Comments
Many bibliometric studies were carried out on Library Philosophy and Practice (LPP-ISSN 1522-0222), one of the leading journals in the field of librarianship (LPP, 2022). However, bibliometric studies on LPP generally answer classic bibliometric questions such as the change in the number of papers published in the journal depending on years, the common characteristics of the most cited papers, the most prolific authors, countries, institutes, frequently studied subjects, the change of the status of multi-authorship over time (see in the references section). On the other hand, the relationship between the number of paper downloads given on the website of the journal and the citations received by the papers, to the best of our knowledge, has not yet been the subject of research.