deGroote SL, Shultz M, Doranski M, "Online journals' impact on the citation patterns of medical faculty" Journal of the Medical Library Association 93(2):223-228, April 2005.

[Eugene Garfield]

Sandra L. De Groote: sgroote at uic.edu
Mary Shultz: shultz at uic.edu
Marceline Doranski: marcicd at uic.edu

TITLE   :Online journals' impact on the citation patterns of medical faculty

AUTHOR  :Sandra L. De Groote, MLIS, AHIP, Assistant Professor and Assistant
Information Services Librarian
Library of the Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1750 West
Polk Street, Chicago, IL 60612.

Mary Shultz, MS, AHIP, Assistant Professor and Assistant Health Sciences
Librarian.
Library of the Health Sciences-Urbana University of Illinois at Chicago 506
South Mathews Urbana, Illinois 61801

Marceline Doranski, RN, MLIS, Assistant Professor and Assistant Information
Services Librarian
Library of the Health Sciences University of Illinois at Chicago 1750 West
Polk Street Chicago, Illinois 60612

SOURCE : Journal of the Medical Library Association 93(2):223-228, April 2005.


Abstract

Purpose: The purpose was to determine the impact of online journals on the
citation patterns of medical faculty. This study looked at whether
researchers were more likely to limit the resources they consulted and cited
to those journals available online rather than those only in print.

Setting: Faculty publications from the college of medicine at a large urban
university were examined for this study. The faculty publications from a
regional medical college of the same university were also examined in the
study. The number of online journals available for faculty, staff, and
students at this institution has increased from an initial core of 15 online
journals in 1998 to over 11,000 online journals in 2004.

Methodology: Searches by author affiliation were performed in the Web of
Science to find all articles written by faculty members in the college of
medicine at the selected institution. Searches were conducted for the
following years: 1993, 1996, 1999, and 2002. Cited references from each
faculty-authored article were recorded, and the corresponding cited journals
were coded into four categories based on their availability at the
institution in this study: print only, print and online, online only, and
not owned. Results were analyzed using SPSS.

Results: The number of journals cited per year continued to increase from
1993 to 2002. The results did not indicate that researchers were more likely
to cite online journals or were less likely to cite journals only in print.
At the regional location where the number of print-only journals was
minimal, use of the print-only journals did decrease in 2002, although not
significantly.

Conclusion/Discussion: It is possible that electronic access to information
(i.e., online databases) has had a positive impact on the number of articles
faculty will cite. Results of this study suggest, at this point, that
faculty are still accessing the print-only collection, at least for research
purposes, and are therefore not sacrificing quality for convenience.