Simon Inger and Tracy Gardner, Abingdon, Renew Training, 2012, 127 pp, (estimated), , US$9.99 (kindle edition), £100 (library rate pdf edition), ISBN 978-0-9573920-1-4
Simon Inger and Tracy Gardner, scholarly publishing consultants, report on their large-scale survey (n = 19,064) of journal readers conducted during May, June and July 2012. This research continues, and expands previous research also undertaken by them in 2005 and 2008.
The researchers work their way systematically through their data – which is extensive and available for sale. The research focuses on three main forms of reader behaviour with respect to how readers discover journal content, citation searching, core journal browsing and subject searching, and correlates these behaviours to a range of discovery methods (abstracts and indexes, publisher sites, alerts, library web pages etc.), countries of origin, sectors, job roles and disciplines. The purpose of the research is to “inform publishers as to which kinds of starting points they should seek to enable first, for the greatest possible return in reader traffic”.
Respondents, whilst all English speaking, came from all parts of the globe with the greatest numbers of respondents being in North America (3218) and the United Kingdom (1535). Oceania is also represented, with 525 responses received from Australia. Respondents came from a range of sectors including academic and corporate, as well as different disciplines and income levels. The academic sector is by far the most heavily represented (n = 13,038) with the majority of job roles in this sector being academic researchers (n = 8953). Students (n = 2591) and lecturers (n = 2310) are also represented.
For academic libraries, the key findings of relevance are the strong support the research gives for both the role of libraries, and the need for publishers to share their metadata. The report supports the importance of libraries with “their web-scale discovery solutions as well as the library link resolvers” in user navigation (rating their importance alongside “Google”) and sees libraries as “the main determinants of how different, relevant resources are presented and offered to end users, the way in which the user navigates to a publisher site; and also what part of the site the user is delivered to”. The report urges publishers to share their metadata if they want readers to discover their content (a message their library customers also strongly endorse): “Publishers need to support all conceivable routes to their content through the web” so that “users are able to choose more freely their preferred routes to content; many of the advanced features that users require seem to be migrating to their chosen discovery platforms leaving the publisher site ever more as a content silo”.
For those willing to sort through the findings there are interesting insights into user search habits. There are differences between user types and disciplines which academic libraries will find interesting. For example, “more senior readers rank journal home pages more highly than do students”. Academic researchers make significantly lower use of journal collections than do lecturers or students, but make slighter greater use of abstracting and indexing services. The most popular discovery methods in humanities, when the user has a citation, are library web pages and journal collections. In life sciences, “A&Is dominate”, people in “Life Science and Medicine” “value PubMed above all other routes” and “Chemists seem to make much more use of the primary publisher's resources (alerts, publisher site and journal pages) than other subject areas”.
Overall the report is worth reading because of its reinforcement of library value and its insight into user habits. Although the data is dense it is worth academic librarians picking their way through it to gain insight into their clients' search habits. A pdf summary edition is also available for free from the publisher site.
© 2013, Laura Maquignaz