Pritchard EE "Retrospective conversion of journal titles to online formats: Which disciplines make good choices?" ASIS 1999: Proceedings of the 62nd ASIS Annual Meeting, Vol:36, 1999 36.1999. p.228-239. Information Today Inc, Medford

[Eugene Garfield]

Eileen E. Pritchard : epritcha at calpoly.edu

FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE AVAILABLE AT :
http://www.web-action.com/pritchard/asispaper1999/

TITLE    Retrospective conversion of journal titles to online formats:
         Which disciplines make good choices?
AUTHOR   Pritchard  EE
JOURNAL  ASIS 1999: Proceedings of the 62nd ASIS Annual Meeting, Vol:36,
1999  36.1999. p.228-239. Information Today Inc, Medford


Abstract

Tenopir and King (1998) reported journal articles five years and older are
found through "citations" among university scientists 13.3% of the time and
among non-university scientists 42.1% of the time. University scientists
ranked finding journal articles from "other persons" and "other" more than
by "citations." Non-university scientists " ranked using "citations the
highest for finding older articles. Clearly this shows linking online
journals to the full text of older cited articles would prove to be a great
convenience to scientists reading recent articles. This research discusses
how to make the best choices for converting journals retrospectively to
digital and online format. The Literature cited was analyzed to find 1.)
the age of the literature used over time and 2.) the mix of types of
literature of the discipline. The disciplines studied were ecology and
biochemistry because of several differences between them. Based upon the
results, differences do exist between the two disciplines in the ages of
literature used. The results show that if 98 percent or more of the
literature is included, retrospective conversion for discipline of ecology
would be more valuable than would biochemistry for the same number of
journal articles. The second part of the study discussed some possible
screening methods before doing an extensive citation analysis of a
discipline's journal articles. Ecology articles cited books seven times
more than did biochemistry articles. This may be an additional indicator
that ecology has an older, more stable body of literature when compared to
biochemistry. This and additional indicators will be helpful in the initial
identification.