ANALYSIS OF FACULTY CITATION BEHAVIOR IN 'THE ELECTRONIC AGE': A STUDY OF ONE INSTITUTION'S RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Everything's available electronically now! True or false? In October of 2000, the Caltech Library System set out to evaluate this conceit, and gathered data to see just how close to true that statement is. In a collaborative effort involving literally everyone on the Library's 65-person staff, data on cited references were gathered for the three most recent refereed publications (journal or conference papers, books, book chapters, technical reports, or electronically published materials) by all tenure-track faculty, and analyzed using a combination of Microsoft Excel and Access software. Our goal was to discover just how much of the literature cited by Caltech's faculty was, in fact, available electronically (whether or not we had subscriptions) as of October 1, 2000 - a uniform cut-off date for all faculty.

Analyzing the data from 285 faculty and 842 total publications was a tremendous task, and required the surmounting of some roadblocks before it could be completed. Among these were training and hardware issues that required much of the work to be funneled through one or two knowledgeable staffers. While these have since been resolved, they were part of the project.

In preliminary analysis, we found that, 54% of the journals cited were available online, but only about 38% of the cited references were available electronically, a fraction even more significant given Caltech's disproportionately large science and engineering faculty. We found that 62% of the papers were published in 1999 and 2000, and that significant numbers of citations were to items published as long ago as 1970.

The data are now available for manipulation by the Library System's Subject Specialists, and further analyses by research fields can be expected in the coming months.