Exploring the measurement features of usage data for academic literature

• 作者: ZHAO Xing
• 来源期刊: 中国图书馆学报年刊(英文版)
• 学科: 社会科学
• 关键词: BIBLIOMETRICS USAGE data ACADEMIC evaluation CITATION analysis Information behavior
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（1）
• 页码范围: 132-151
• 页数: 20页
• 分类号: G353.1

摘要

The emergence of new data has always been a major force driving the advance of informetrics. The magnitude of data usage for academic literature, given by the Web of Science(Wo S), can be expected to provide a supplementary perspective for citation analysis in three theoretical aspects, which are influence dimension, discipline difference and behavioral motive. Based on 166,767 articles in physics, computer science, economics, and Library and Information Science included by SCI and SSCI in 2013 as research samples, this paper conducts an exploratory investigation into the measurement features of the usage data. According to the results, compared with citation data, usage is more discriminative and sensitive. In terms of distribution, usage presents an approximate and positively skewed distribution at high-frequency. An approximate power-law distribution is observed in the cumulative integral. The evaluation result of usage is independent to a certain degree and poses no essential opposition to the result of citation. Although the usage of the Wo S platform still has the limitations of generality, falsifiability and isolation, usage may be accepted as one of the possible options that supplement citation data and provide a richer field of vision for influence evaluation. There are 4 figures, 6 tables and 23 references in this paper.