NASIG 2017

Libraries have long sought to demonstrate the value of their collections through a variety of usage statistics. Traditionally, a strong emphasis is placed on high usage statistics when evaluating journals in collection development discussions. However, as budget pressures persist, administrators are increasingly concerned with looking beyond traditional usage metrics to determine the real impact of library services and collections. By examining journal usage in the context of scholarly communication, we hope to gain a more holistic understanding of the use and impact of our library’s resources. In this session, we begin by outlining our methodology for gathering comprehensive publication and citation data for authors affiliated with Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, utilizing Web of Science as our primary data source and leveraging a custom Python script to manage the data. Using this data we discuss various potential metrics that could be employed to measure and evaluate journals in institutional and field-specific contexts, including but not limited to: number of publications and references per journal, co-citation networks, percentage of references per journal, and increases or decreases of references over time per title. We then consider the development of normalized benchmarks and criteria for creating field-specific core journal lists. We also discuss a process for establishing usage thresholds to evaluate existing journal subscriptions and to highlight potential gaps in the collection. Finally, we apply and compare these metrics to traditional collection development tools like COUNTER usage reports, cost-per-use analysis, Inter-Library Loan statistics and turnaway reports, to determine what correlations or discrepancies might exist. We finish by highlighting some use-cases which demonstrate the value of considering publication and citation metrics, and provide suggestions for incorporating these metrics into library collection development practices.