Katherine V Chew

A case study: Planning a statewide information resource for health professionals: An evidence-based approach

QUESTION What is the best approach for implementing a statewide electronic health library (eHL) to serve all health professionals in Minnesota? SETTING The research took place at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Libraries. METHODS In January 2008, the authors began planning a statewide eHL for health professionals following the five-step process for evidence-based librarianship: formulating the question, finding the best evidence, appraising the evidence, assessing costs and benefits, and evaluating the effectiveness of resulting actions. MAIN RESULTS The authors identified best practices for developing a statewide eHL for health professionals relating to audience or population served, information resources, technology and access, funding model, and implementation and sustainability. They were compared to the mission of the eHL project to drive strategic directions by developing recommendations. CONCLUSION EBL can guide the planning process for a statewide eHL, but findings must be tailored to the local environment to address information needs and ensure long-term sustainability.

E-Journal Metrics for Collection Management: Exploring Disciplinary Usage Differences in Scopus and Web of Science

Objective – The purpose was to determine whether a relationship exists between journal downloads and either faculty authoring venue or citations to these faculty, or whether a relationship exists between journal rankings and local authoring venues or citations. A related purpose was to determine if any such relationship varied between or within disciplines. A final purpose was to determine if specific tools for ranking journals or indexing authorship and citation were demonstrably better than alternatives. Methods – Multiple years of journal usage, ranking, and citation data for twelve disciplines were combined in Excel, and the strength of relationships were determined using rank correlation coefficients. Results – The results illustrated marked disciplinary variation as to the degree that faculty decisions to download a journal article can be used as a proxy to predict which journals they will publish in or which journals will cite faculty’s work. While journal access requests show moderate to strong relationships with the journals in which faculty publish, as well as journals whose articles cite local faculty, the data suggest that Scopus may be the better resource to find such information for these journals in the health sciences and Web of Science may be the better resource for all other disciplines analyzed. The same can be said for the ability of external ranking mechanisms to predict faculty publishing behaviours. Eigenfactor is more predictive for both authoring and citing-by-others across most of the representative disciplines in the social sciences as well as the physical and natural sciences. With the health sciences, no clear pattern emerges. Conclusion – Collecting and correlating authorship and citation data allows patterns of use to emerge, resulting in a more accurate picture of use activity than the commonly used cost-per-use method. To find the best information on authoring activity by local faculty for subscribed journals, use Scopus. To find the best information on citing activity by faculty peers for subscribed titles use Thomson Reuters’ customized Local Journal Use Reports (LJUR), or limit a Web of Science search to local institution. The Eigenfactor and SNIP journal quality metrics results can better inform selection decisions, and are publicly available. Given the trend toward more centralized collection development, it is still critical to obtain liaison input no matter what datasets are used for decision making. This evidence of value can be used to defend any local library “tax” that academic departments pay as well as promote services to help faculty demonstrate their research impact.