The Importance of Journals to the Scientific Endeavor Carol Tenopir University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King. Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers. Washington, D.C.: Special Libraries Association, 2000.

Data From: 14,000 scientists All fields of science University and non-university settings Over 100 organizations (publishers and libraries)

Audiences Scientists/Researchers Publishers Librarians Funders

Myths (conceptos erróneos) Myth #1: Scholarly journals are not read Myth #2: There are too many journals Myth #3: Journals are only for authors Myth #4: Scientists know information before it appears in a journal Myth #5: Electronic journals will make editors, publishers, and librarians obsolete

Average Number of Scholarly Article Readings Per Year

Scholarly Article Readings by Medical Faculty University medical faculty read 322 articles per year ( ) Consistent with earlier studies

Time Spent Reading

What Scientists Are Reading Approx. 50% of readings contain information that is new to the reader Over 35% of readings are of articles older than one year Older articles are very valuable to scientists’ work

What Medical Scientists are Reading Among medical faculty, over 87% of readings were from the past 14 months 94% of readings were from the past 2 years.

Facts Behind the Myths Growth of journal literature is correlated with the number of scientists 1 article per 10 scientists 70% of all readings are done by non- academicians

Amount of Journal Readings Scientists read from an average of journals each year Medical faculty read from an average of 13 journals each year Medical faculty read more in each journal (26 articles)

Average Number of Personal Subscriptions to Scholarly Journals

WWW Impact: PubMed A month of searches in PubMed equaled a year of fee-based MEDLINE searches (about 7.6 million) 90% of all Medline searches are in PubMed Today, the number of PubMed searches ranges from 500,000 to over one million per day

Impacts of Electronic Publishing Electronic journals use is increasing Students prefer electronic Differences between work fields PubMed - big impact on adoption of electronic journals Peer review important to many Much e-reading in new titles Non-core readers price sensitive

The Importance of Journals to the Scientific Endeavor Information serves many purposes Highly important to these purposes Readers are willing to pay a high price for the information in their time The information results in improved performance

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