New Study Identifies Half-Life of Journal Articles

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-01-08

Summary:

How do you judge how much a scientific study or academic article has been used? You can see how frequently it’s cited, but since researchers and academics read and are influenced by plenty of things that don’t get formally checked in their work, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Researcher Philip Davis is trying to provide some new answers to that question by taking a look at ‘usage half-life,’ in an effort to learn more about the academic publishing life cycle. Usage half-life is an estimate of how long it takes group of articles published in an online journal to reach one half of the number of downloads that they will ever have. Davis hopes the metric can contribute to the continuing conversation surrounding journal access, by giving everyone from librarians to policy makers a reliable, evidence-based tool for determining how journals are used by students, professors, and researchers. “The formation of good science policy should be guided by scientific evidence,” Davis told Library Journal. “Not speculation, and certainly not wishful thinking.” Similar means for measuring citation of a given article have been around for years, said Davis, but it’s only recently that tracking of article downloads has made it possible to see not only what researchers are citing in their papers, but what they and others are reading as well. Davis admits that showing how many times an article has been downloaded does not show how many times it has been actually read, but said that the download number is at least a good place to start. Davis’ study, which was funded by the American Association of Publishers (AAP) Professional & Scholarly Publishing division, found that only three percent of journals hit their half-life mark in less than 12 months. Engineering journals were the mostly likely to have brief half-lives, with 6 percent achieving their half-life in less than a year, while only one percent of life science journals hit their half-life in that time span. The shortest half-lives Davis recorded belonged to journals covering health and medical science, where articles reached their half-life in an average of between two and three years. Journals with the longest usage half-life tended to cover disciplines like physics and mathematics, as well as the humanities. Most journals seem to hit their half-life between two and four years ..."

Link:

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/01/publishing/new-study-identifies-half-life-of-journal-articles/#_

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.policies oa.embargoes oa.metrics oa.usage oa.studies oa.aap oa.publishers oa.business_models

Date tagged:

01/08/2014, 17:43

Date published:

01/08/2014, 12:43