Hiroshi Itsumura

The changes in Japanese researchers' usage and perception of electronic resources: Result of SCREAL Survey 2011

The Standing Committee for Research on Academic Libraries (SCREAL), in cooperation with 45 institutions in Japan, conducted a questionnaire survey from October to December 2011. As a result, 3,922 valid responses across various fields were collected. Following up this survey, we attempt here to clarify how usage and perception of e-journals and scholarly articles among researchers and graduate students in Japan changed. The basic findings were as follows. 1) More than 90% of respondents in natural sciences, including pharmaceutical science, chemistry, biology, physics and medicine, reported that they used e-journals at least once or twice a month. 2) E-journals were not as heavily used in humanities and social sciences as in natural sciences, but the proportion of regular users turned out to be more than 4 times that of the 2001 survey. 3) This difference in e-journals usage by discipline is strongly associated with the degree of dependence on domestic documents written in Japanese. The two groups of respondents, users of international documents and users of domestic documents, showed a statistically significant difference in answering the question concerning “Frequency of e-journals use.” 4) Attitude to the necessity of printed version drastically transmuted. 62.3% of respondents in natural sciences and 53.6% in humanities and social sciences thought “printed journals are unnecessary when e-journals are accessible.” 5) Use of digital devices for e-books was not popular as yet, but the respondents expressed their high interest in the future use. Some preliminary discussion is made to identify the factors affecting the usage and/or perception of electronic resources by Japanese researchers.

Modeling of Enjyo via Process of Consensus Formation on SNS

“The pen is mightier than the sword” said in previous times, the role of dispatching information was given to the people with the special trainee, the people called “Mass-Communication”. However, it has become possible for everyone to dispatch the information on social society with the advent of the Web. Accordingly, Enjyo is often observed on Social Networking Services. Enjyo is a phenomenon that leads the tragedy to individual/company who sends the promotion information via a process of consensus formation as the result of many SNS users. In this research, we analyze the value of reputation on social media in some cases with the purpose of modeling Enjyo. In this study, we tried to numerically analyze and model some cases of Enjyo as well as to classify them by using the data on SNS. For achieving our purpose, we proposed a method of measuring a state of Enjyo and applied the case study method for analysis. With this method, the process of the analysis is likely to be influenced by one’s subjective interpretation or assessment. Therefore, we also tried to facilitate its efficiency and accuracy with random sampling. As a result, several patterns of Enjyo were identified. Moreover, one of the cases of appropriate Enjyo extinction was observed.

ZS Project: Zoological Science meets Institutional Repositories

To evaluate how the deposition of journal articles in Institutional Repositories (IRs) affects the number of citations and e-journal usage, we placed some articles published in Zoological Science in two IRs, and compared their use in IRs with e-journals, as well as with the number of resulting citations between 2008 and 2009. The results reveal that deposit in IRs did not reduce e-journal usage. Moreover, whereas the journals gained new readers, this did not have an effect on the number of citations.