Open access (OA) journals promote the opportunity for peer-reviewed journal articles to be freely accessible. In recent years, the number of OA journals has exploded in all disciplines. Previous studies have identified print-based pedagogical discipline-specific journals outside the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) for librarians to…

Economists have built a theory to understand markets in which, rather than selling directly to buyers, suppliers sell through a platform, which controls prices on both sides. The theory has been applied to understand markets ranging from telephony, to credit cards, to media. In this paper, we apply the theory to the market for scholarly journals,…

It has been approximately 20 years since distributing scholarly journals digitally became feasible. This article discusses the broad implications of the transition to digital distributed scholarship from a historical perspective and focuses on the development of open access (OA) and the various models for funding OA in the context of the roles…

Past studies of citation coverage of "Web of Science," "Scopus," and "Google Scholar" do not demonstrate a consistent pattern that can be applied to the interdisciplinary mix of resources used in social work research. To determine the utility of these tools to social work researchers, an analysis of citing references to well-known social work…

This article considers Open Access (OA) training and the supports and structures in place in academic libraries in the United States from the perspective of a new librarian. OA programming is contextualized by the larger project of Scholarly Communication in academic libraries, and the two share a historical focus on journal literature and a…

Increased mention of journal clubs in the library literature and the recent creation of clubs at the authors' institutions sparked curiosity about how widespread they are in academic libraries. An online survey announced on library listservs assessed their prevalence and practices. Library journal clubs promote current awareness, analysis skills,…

This article examines citations of Western journals in eight LIS journals and six history journals published in Taiwan. The findings show that both the Western journals' impact factor values and whether they are included in JCR may not necessarily indicate their real use in Taiwan's LIS and history research--especially in history research.…

Information use patterns by doctoral students are studied for selected years in the pre-web (1990-1993) and post-web (2003-2006) time periods. Over 55,000 citations from dissertations in ten disciplines were analyzed. The results show that there was some increase in journal use in most of the disciplines in the post-web era, and that the use of…

This study analyzed reference lists in a large number of master's and doctoral theses in a university library of psychology and education sciences. It compared citation counts to other indicators of the use of periodicals. The usefulness and limitations of these statistics are discussed in relation to decision-making in subscriptions' management.…

Citation attributes were found to be strongly associated with the omission of citations from the cited article lists in 603 "SCIE" records from six chemistry journals. By requiring well-documented citations and by making it easier to identify where one citation ends and the next one begins, journals can help minimize the number of omitted…

This study compared Social Work Abstracts and Social Services Abstracts databases in terms of indexing, journal coverage, and searches. The authors interviewed editors, analyzed journal coverage, and compared searches. It was determined that the databases complement one another more than compete. The authors conclude with some considerations.

Studies suggest that co-authorship results in a higher quality article. This study looks for evidence of this in the literature of academic librarianship. Using citation counts to articles from two important journals over a ten-year period, no evidence is found to support the superiority of co-authored articles.

Keeping abreast of professional literature and the latest trends is critical for academic librarians to be successful, but in a time of information glut, are librarians achieving this? Over seven hundred academic librarians responded to this survey and inform us about their use of both traditional methods and new technologies to stay current.

Library literature publishes hundreds of articles on information literacy, many emphasizing the importance of collaboration and faculty outreach. A systematic search of fifty-four non-library journals that publish pedagogical articles reveals that some librarians are reaching out to faculty in disciplinary publications. However, this method of…

"Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries" has long been an important tool for librarians making collection development decisions. This study examines the holdings and usage for books reviewed in "Choice," books designated by "Choice" as Outstanding Academic Titles, and the general collections of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries.