Beyond journal impact and usage statistics: Using citation analysis for collection development

Academic libraries have a long history of assessing the collection and determining if the collection meets the need of academic departments. Citation analysis, a research method to understand users’ information behavior, allows the library to carry out this assessment. However, conducting a citation analysis is laborious. How can we employ current tools to make this time-consuming process productive? What kind of data can we draw from the study to inform collection development practice and articulate the value of library?

This session describes a citation analysis project that examines citations in publications by communication faculty between 2006 and 2014 using SCOPUS. Citation analysis provides valuable information on material type, age, subject area, local core journals and titles for future purchase. This study also aims at finding if faculty is using and citing high impact journals. A Spearman’s correlation was performed to determine the relationship between journal citation count, journal impact factor (JCR), SCImago journal rank (SJR), and journal usage statistics. The preliminary finding of this study indicates that high impact journals were used more, but not being cited more.

The session will detail data collection and analysis procedures and share the advantage and disadvantage of using SCOPUS as a citation analysis tool. It will also discuss the benefit of using SPSS to run analyses. Through discussion with participants about the value of conducting a citation analysis, the presenter hopes to spark interest among librarians in analyzing faculty citation behaviors as one way to evaluate library collection and using evidence-based practice to prove the value of library.