Journal usage at department and research group level ...

The University of Akron

From the SelectedWorks of Ian McCullough

July 7, 2016

Journal usage at department and research grouplevel (postprint)Ian McCullough

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/ian_mccullough/13/

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Journal Usage, Department and Research Group Level

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Journal Usage at Department and Research Group Level

Ian McCullough

The University of Akron

Abstract: Journal usage in the Department of Polymer Science at the University of Akron from

2006-2011 was determined by counting citations within faculty-supervised dissertations and

faculty publications. Ranked title lists were created and correlations between journal usage in

faculty publications and faculty-supervised dissertations were measured using Kendall’s rank-

correlation coefficient. Dissertations and faculty publications were also organized by research

group and correlated within groups. Dissertations and faculty publications were found to have a

much stronger positive correlation within the group than within the department. Individual

groups were found to have highly variable correlation with each other. Examining journal usage

at group level gives a more nuanced view of serials usage for faculty and graduate students than

the departmental level. Implications for collection development are discussed.

Keywords: Research group, usage statistics, University of Akron, polymer, science, serial, faculty, dissertation

Author Note Ian McCullough, Physical Sciences Librarian, Science & Technology Library, University of

Akron. Correspondence to Ian McCullough, University of Akron, ASEC-138, Akron, OH, 44325-

3907. E-mail: [email protected]

Received: June 24, 2015 Accepted: July 28, 2015 This is an electronic version of an article published in Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 2016, VOL. 28, NO. 2, 73-83. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1941126X.2016.1164550


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Journal Usage at Department and Research Group Level

In research departments with laboratories, the basic organizational unit is the group

(Etzkowitz, 1992), led by a principal investigator (PI) who directs the research, mentors graduate

students, submits grants, and writes journal articles. There may also be post-doctoral researchers,

undergraduates, administrative assistants, lab technicians, and programmers in a lab group.

Subject librarians for science departments often rely on citation studies to assist in determining

journal purchases and cancellations. Does the administrative unit of the department, however,

have anything to do with the intellectual organization of the PIs in the department? Many papers

examine the usage patterns of departments without questioning whether the department is the

best way to examine usage. This article investigates research group identity as expressed through

journal usage and how this differs from journal usage at the department level. Individual groups

are compared to see how well they correlate with each other within the department.

Another aspect of research science and lab groups is the amount of internal knowledge

transfer that happens as the manner and methods of the group are learned. Informal knowledge

transfer happens within groups, within departments, in halls, and between friends. Does the

culture of the lab, and the particular research focus of a group, lead to members of a group using

the same set of journals? This paper also explores the correlation between citations in PI

publications and in the doctoral dissertations they supervise.

To answer these various questions, this author counted journal citations from dissertations in

the Department of Polymer Science (DPS) at the University of Akron from 2006-2011 and

compared them to DPS faculty publications during the same period. These large data sets were

then subdivided and organized by research group. Dissertations and faculty publications within


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research groups were then compared. The journal citations were counted by individual journal

title and the ranked lists of journals were compared for correlation using Kendall’s Tau-b.

Literature Review

Departmental Faculty and Student Journal Usage

McCain and Bobick (1981) looked at faculty publications, dissertations, and graduate

qualifying briefs over a 3-year period in the Temple University Biology Department. While

finding the citation patterns of the groups very similar, a small sample size of dissertations and

incomplete representation of faculty publications weakened their results. They note, “Several

faculty, while actively doing research and publishing the results, did not oversee a completed

dissertation during our study” (p. 264). They used the study to identify less-productive journals

for possible cancellation and to identify a cutoff date for local journal holdings.

Graduate theses and faculty-publication citation patterns in geosciences at UCLA and

Stanford were compared, the authors finding that student and faculty journal usage patterns do

not predict each other (Noga, Derksen, & Haner, 1993). This conclusion is not based on an

empirical measure, but rather the lists do not look similar when compared. These ranked lists

included non-journal materials, and also they brought in theses from outside years to complete

coverage. The faculty publication citations and thesis citations were only two of five metrics

used overall for the UCLA comparisons and six measurements for the Stanford comparison. The

authors wanted a complete picture of who was using the library, and the other measures are not

relevant to the current study.

Graduate-student journal-circulation rank was compared to undergraduate and faculty journal-

circulation rank at the Biology Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

(UIUC) (Schmidt, Davis, & Jahr, 1994). Among the top 25 circulating titles, researchers stated


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there was good agreement in the top ten and less agreement about lower rankings in the list,

although this part of the study had no quantitative evaluation. They concluded, “It may be valid

to assume that faculty and graduate students are using the same journals, and thus use faculty

publications to represent graduate student use as well” (p. 46).

Zipp (1996) compared four sets of faculty and thesis/dissertation citations using Kendall’s

coefficient of rank correlation, finding good correlation and concluding, “The most heavily cited

journal titles in theses and dissertations can be used as a surrogate for the titles most heavily used

by faculty in their publications” (p. 341). Zipp used her own collected statistics from Iowa State

University in addition to the UCLA and Stanford data sets from Noga, Derksen, and Haner and

Temple data set from McCain and Bobick, finding strong correlation at Iowa and Temple, good

correlation at Stanford, and weak but significant correlation at UCLA. Her data collection

method was to solicit faculty for their publications, but she supplemented these results by

searching GeoRef to get full subdisciplinary coverage.

Comparing journal citations from faculty publications to freshman composition paper

citations, Joswick and Stierman (1997) found great dissimilarity, although their definition of

“journal” includes popular, non-scholarly periodicals and newspapers.

Based on Zipp’s work, Edwards (1999) concluded graduate works could substitute for faculty

publications and used a random sample of dissertations and theses at the University of Akron to

assess the collection for the departments of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering, making

journal-cancellation decisions based on the results.

Kraus (2005) compared 90 faculty publications of the Biological Science Department at the

University of Denver from a 5-year period to 33 undergraduate research papers from a 2-year


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period, finding 12 of the top 20 journals colisted. This was not as powerful a correlation as

expected.

Pancheshnikov (2007) compared faculty and graduate thesis citations using ISI Web of

Science to gather faculty citations and manual counting for the master’s theses. Although not

comparing ranked lists, she found the 75% of journal titles were found only in faculty

publications when looking at faculty publications; 58% of journal titles were unique to theses in

those publications. Pancheshnikov isolated heavily cited journals and found only 59% and 34%

unique titles for faculty publications and theses respectively. She concluded that “citations

retrieved from faculty publications and student theses cannot substitute each other for the

purpose of serials management” (p. 679).

Wirth and Mellinger (2011) compared 15 master’s theses and three dissertations from the

Water Resources Graduate Program at Oregon State University from 2004 to 2009 to the 2003

assessment of predicted journal needs for the department. They concluded that of all the factors

they considered, faculty publishing was the best predictor over both interlibrary loan requests

and Journal Citation Reports (http://webofknowledge.com/JCR). The authors noted that based

on Zipp (1996), they had expected a stronger relationship between faculty publishing and

graduate citations, but noted that faculty citations might have been a stronger predictor than

publishing venue.

Laboratory Groups

The Department of Polymer Science, located in the College of Polymer Science and Polymer

Engineering, is an interdisciplinary collection of polymer researchers. Rubber chemistry,

electrospinning physics, rheology, computational modeling, dendrimers, spider silk, and

medicinal adhesives were just some of the research projects active during the current study. All


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graduate student research at DPS is organized into PI-led research groups, which is typical for

chemistry research (Brown, 2010; Schonfeld & Long, 2013) and physics (Becher, 1990;

Birnholtz, 2006). Organization into lab groups is so ubiquitous in research science that it is used

for multiple fields without specification (Lee, Dennis, & Campbell, 2007). Advisor PIs in lab

groups tend to run the enterprise like a small business, possibly having little day-to-day

interaction with the graduate students (Delamont, Parry, & Atkinson, 1997; Etzkowitz, 1992).

However, the dissertation topic must fit into the larger project of the group yet still be original

(Etzkowitz, 1992). In a survey of a wide array of scientific disciplines at Georgia State

University, graduate students and postdocs named their group advisor as the person they would

consult first when looking for information (Tomaszewski, 2012). Lab groups also serve as a

community of practice where graduate students learn how to be scientists (Hara, Solomon, Kim,

& Sonnenwald, 2003). In terms of library research into research groups, the literature is quite

thin. Jaguszewski and Williams (2013) advocate that liaisons work directly with research teams

during outreach. MacKenzie (2014) examined lab groups in the context of embedded

librarianship and suggested groups would be good targets for individual attention because of

their highly specific needs.

Research Method

Full-text PDFs of DPS dissertations from 2006-2011 were downloaded from the Electronic

Thesis and Dissertation Center of OhioLINK (http://etd.ohiolink.edu/). Dissertations were

categorized by faculty advisor, and journal references were manually counted and tallied by title

and totals recorded in a spreadsheet program. Total data set was 85 dissertations from 16 faculty

advisors. “Journal” was defined loosely, but generally excluded monographic serials (notable

exception being Advances in Polymer Science) and proceedings or meetings notes (notable


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exception being ACS Polymer Preprints) Over this time, there were 29 faculty members in DPS

as determined by departmental records of faculty appointments. Some faculty had no advisees

due to their recent appointment, while others had retired during this time or stopped advising

graduate students.

Faculty original research publications from 2006-2011 were gathered from Thomson Reuters

Web of Science (www.webofknowledge.com/wos). Faculty names, refined by institute name or

zip code, were initially used in an advanced search, then refined by articles, proceedings papers,

and meeting abstracts as Web of Science document types. Meeting abstracts very rarely had

indexed references, and proceedings papers usually had few references compared to journal

articles, making journal citations the overwhelming source for the majority of the citations

examined.

Review articles were discarded from consideration for several reasons – they are summaries

of research but are not original research, they have a distorting number of references (over 2000

in one review during this period), and because reviews require comprehensive coverage, it makes

little sense to shape collection development using them. Of these reasons, lack of originality is

most important – reviews may touch research generated in a lab group, but they are not research.

Faculty publications were searched individually for each advisor, as an entire department,

including all 29 faculty, and as a subset of just the 16 dissertation-advising faculty. Due to

departmental coauthorships, individual faculty counts cannot be added to find the advisor subset.

Cited references from these faculty publications were exported to Microsoft Excel and altered

to have journal title first using Cusker’s method (2012). Trimmed citations were organized into a

single column for counting using a VBA macro (ExtendOffice, 2015), then citations for each

journal title counted. Both lists were checked against the literature for clarification of ambiguous


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or partial citations. Digital object identifiers (DOIs) were used when available, but Google

Scholar, SciFinder Scholar, and the Chemical Abstract Service Source Index (CASSI)

(http://cassi.cas.org/search.jsp) were all used to decipher and identify obscure citations. Citations

that could not be identified and assigned a journal title were not counted. Citations to

forthcoming, unpublished, or in-press articles were also not counted.

Finally, journal titles were consolidated based on the publisher’s current ordering and volume

numbering. For example, citation counts for the Journal of Polymer Science Part A: Polymer

Chemistry also includes the Journal of Polymer Science, Journal of Polymer Science Part A:

General Papers, Journal of Polymer Chemistry Part A-1: Polymer Chemistry, and Journal of

Polymer Science: Polymer Chemistry Edition. The CAS Source Index was also used to identify

title changes, former titles, alternate titles, abbreviations, and successor titles.

Journal-title lists were consolidated to create a combined spreadsheet of journals used for

dissertations from each advisor, faculty publications from each advisor, all advisor publications,

and all faculty publications. Kendall’s Tau-b correlations (Kendall & Gibons, 1990) between all

these populations were calculated using SPSS 22.0.0.0. The Kendall Tau coefficient gives a

quantitative measure of rank correlation between pairs of ordinal lists by comparing concordant

and discordant list pairs. The value is given from +1.0 indicated perfect correlation, to -1.0

indicating perfect inverse correlation and 0.0 indicating no, or random, correlation. One

assumption of the basic form of Kendall’s Tau is that the two lists being compared do not have

any tied counts for the same listed value. Obviously large ranked lists of journal titles from

multiple sources will have many hundreds of ties due to journals cited once or not at all.

Kendall’s Tau-b was used because it is a modified version of the basic Kendall’s Tau with an


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adjustment for ties (Boslaugh, 2012). Although all data in this study was collected from publicly

available sources without interaction with the faculty, groups have been assigned variables.

Results

In all, 85 doctoral dissertations were examined and 12,628 journal references counted for

individual serial titles. From the Web of Science data, 378 faculty publications were counted,

totaling 12,470 journal references. For all DPS faculty, a total of 15,155 references from 464

publications were counted. Between the summed totals of all DPS faculty and all the

dissertations, a total of 1,422 different journal titles were cited from 2006-2011. A summary of

this data is presented in Table 1. Journal citations made up 87.2% of dissertation citations and

90.6% of all faculty citations, which is similar to recent studies on journal citation percentages of

scientific journal publications in Quebec (Larivière, Sugimoto, & Bergeron, 2013), faculty in

atmospheric science at Texas A & M University (Kimball, Stephens, Hubbard, & Pickett, 2013),

chemistry graduate students at Mississippi State University (Zhang, 2013), and Chemical and

Biomolecular Engineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Biological Sciences at Notre Dame

(Kayongo & Helm, 2012). However, the current results conflict with an earlier study that

includes DPS from 1990–1996, which found journals accounted for only 77.4% of dissertation

references (Edwards, 1999). This suggests that DPS journal citation rates are within the expected

frequency range of researchers at the time of the current study, but that journal citation rates

within the field may have increased in the 15 years between the two studies.

[place Table 1 here]

Scholarly activity among the 16 dissertation-advising faculty groups is highly idiosyncratic,

as noted in Table 2. Group I has a very low average citation rate for both the PIs publications

and dissertations, and they also use a comparatively narrow set of journals. On the other hand,


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the number of citations in dissertations from Group F are on average more than double any other

group.


Kendall’s Tau-b rank correlations were calculated comparing the journal usage rank of each

advising faculty member to the journal usage ranks of all the dissertations from their group.

Journal usage ranks of individual advising faculty were also compared to all dissertations, all

advisors, and all faculty. The collective journal rank lists for all dissertations, all advisors, and all

faculty were also compared to each other. A summary of these correlations and the increases in

correlation of faculty publications with their advisee dissertations as compared to all other

faculty are shown in Table 3. All groups show a stronger positive correlation with their advisees

than with the entire faculty. The subset of advising faculty has an expectedly strong positive

correlation of 0.780 with all faculty. Groups A, B, and M have a high number of inter-

departmental coauthorships, so it is not surprising they have a relatively low increase in Tau-b

between faculty and advisees. Faculty publications from groups H, I, and K are much more

strongly correlated with their group dissertations than the other groups. Overall, the increase in

journal rank correlation of faculty and their group when compared to overall faculty is

substantial.



A comparison of all faculty adviser group publication correlations is presented in Table 4,

again showing a wide variety. The high level of faculty collaboration suggested in Table 3 for

groups A, B, and M is shown more clearly, with groups B and M having the highest Tau-b of any

two groups at 0.577, and groups A and B having a moderate correlation of 0.519. All of these


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faculty group publication correlations are higher than the correlation of the PI and their advisees.

By comparison, the somewhat idiosyncratic groups H, I, and K have maximum correlations of

0.415, 0.257, and 0.402. Also there are some examples of near random correlation, the Kendall’s

Tau-b of Group F and Group O is 0.082. Group O represents a joint appointed faculty member

though with low total citations. Among full-time DPS faculty Groups B and I have the next

lowest correlation at 0.100. Among faculty with at least 500 citations, Groups F and H have the

lowest correlation of 0.118.

Considering only the top 100 ranked journals from all faculty in Table 5, the Kendall’s Tau-b

correlation to all dissertations increases to 0.633. These top journals represent 77.1% of

dissertation journal citations and 78.8% of faculty-published work journal citations. The increase

in correlation is similar to the observation by Pancheshnikov (2007) that thesis and faculty

publications share more titles among the most highly cited journals.


The 50 most frequently used journals for all faculty are ranked with raw citation count in

Table 6, count and rank for the advisor and the dissertations. Although the lists are in broad

agreement and show tremendous consistency among the top 20 journals, there are some

noteworthy anomalies demonstrating the importance of the research group. The Journal of

Catalysis (ranked 29th) has 107 citations among all faculty, but only 1 among the advisor subset

and 2 among the dissertations. In this case, only one group is substantially responsible for all the

citations. Organometallics is ranked 35th among all faculty, 94th among advisors and 70th among

dissertations. Biomaterials is ranked 23rd among all faculty, 46th among advisors, and 68th among

dissertations. In a similar but reversed case, The Journal of Rheology (ranked 7th) has only 1

additional citation by adding all non-advising faculty and of the 345 advising faculty citations


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335 of these citations are from one group (Group H). Among the dissertations, 110 out of 118

citations to The Journal of Rheology are also from Group H. Group H also averages only 102

citations per dissertation (Table 2), explaining why The Journal of Rheology is ranked only 20th

among dissertations. Rheologica Acta is similarly represented – Group H accounts for 110 out of

112 article citations and 58 out of 62 dissertation citations. Soft Matter has a seemingly

anomalous number of advisor citations compared to the dissertation pool (54 compared to 7)

possibly because the journal began publication in 2005 and had not grown to prominence by the

time dissertation literature reviews were done and the doctoral project conceived.

[place Table 6 here, or at end]

Finally, Figure 1 presents the top 10 ranked journals of both faculty publications and from the

dissertations for three groups with at least 500 journal citations for both the published research

and dissertations. Viewing these side-by-side lists of top cited journals for each group it is clear

that doctoral students use the same journals as their advisor, but also that departmental groups

have a distinct set of journals they use most heavily.

[place Figure 1 here, or at end]

Discussion

That doctoral advisees working in a research group setting would share tremendous similarity

in journal usage with published scholarship from the same group is an intuitive proposition, or as

one DPS faculty told me, “It is completely obvious.” Earlier researchers recognized the need for

disciplinary coverage when comparing departmental and graduate-student journal usage

(McCain & Bobick, 1981; Noga, Derksen, & Haner, 1993; Zipp, 1996) even if they did not

explicitly use the language of groups. Faculty departments are not homogeneous pools and are

not suitable for random sampling to determine journal usage. Research groups in the sciences are


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a bit like a small business, with the PI directing the efforts of all the students and employees.

Usually a lab group investigates several lines of research simultaneously, and graduate students

are given doctoral projects within the domain of these existing projects. Also like a small

business, labs rely on or are constrained by resources – human, physical, and organizational. If a

specific category of instrumentation is not readily available, it is more difficult or even

impossible to do research. Many labs run on grant funding, where objectives and research goals

are set and studied years in advance. In this environment, it is not surprising that doctoral

students follow the serials usage pattern of their mentor closely and that their doctoral research

does not stray far from the group.

Of immediate interest is the strong correlation between advisor and advisee journal usage.

Although their study included monographic references, this contradicts the claim of Noga and

colleauges (1993) that theses and faculty citations do not predict each other. Early work on the

relationship between faculty and their graduate advisees attempted to see if graduate theses or

dissertations could be used as a proxy for faculty publications (Zipp, 1996). The overall

Kendall’s correlation of 0.247 between all dissertations and all faculty publications using the

complete set of 1,422 journal titles is similar to the 0.108 – 0.342 range of results obtained by

Zipp (1996). However, when only the top-ranked journals were compared, the Kendall’s Tau-b

correlation jumped to 0.633. Considering the Kendall’s Tau calculations of Zipp (1996) had

samples sizes between 52 and 60, it is possible the increase in sample size also increased

correlation. It is also possible that the narrow focus of the department (polymers) leads to the

high correlation.

The strength of empirical correlation between individual DPS researchers corresponds to

intuition – frequent collaborators and members of a particular subdiscipline (e.g. synthetic


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polymer chemists) are strongly correlated, whereas members of different subdisciplines are not.

Researchers in DPS also come from different foundational fields – some self-identify as

physicists and others as chemists, while some would say they research rheology or surface

studies. The variability of journal usage between groups, even with a relatively tight focus like

polymers, indicates that an academic department is not a suitable pool for examining the serials

needs of faculty in research groups. By extension of the strong correlation between faculty

journal usage and doctoral student journal usage, the department level is also not suitable for

examining doctoral student journal needs.

The sampling method of theses and dissertations by Edwards (1999) is then highly

questionable. For example, under or over-representing Group I, which has 34% of all journal

citations to Rubber Chemistry and Technology, would greatly skew the importance of this

journal in the overall results. Although highly ranked overall, The Journal of Rheology is

mission-critical to one group and simply nice to have for all the other groups. Also, Journal of

Macromolecular Science: Pure and Applied Chemistry fell from a rank of 24 in dissertations

(Edwards, 1999) to 54 in this study due to either more accurate measure or genuine changes in

usage. Only one faculty member (Group J) placed this journal in their top 10, and group J has left

the department. Given these facts ceasing the subscription to Journal of Macromolecular Science

(both A and B) was a relatively easy decision, as each journal costs over $5,000 annually. The

funds were redistributed to newer journals with greater usage, and DPS faculty were in full

agreement and by all accounts are pleased with the new subscriptions.

Conclusion

Earlier researchers wondered whether the locally held master’s theses could serve as an

adequate proxy for faculty publications for use in serials collections. Today, with access to Web


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of Science, SciFinder Scholar, PubMed, and Engineering Village, librarians can find and

examine the serials usage of faculty directly. Graduate dissertations, however, are not indexed

and organized in the same manner and the question is now reversed: Can faculty publications

suitably serve to inform serials decisions for at least the dissertations? Within the research group

the data indicates this to be accurate, but with several qualifications.

First, research groups change focus – projects can evolve naturally or by the pressures of

grant funding. When this happens, it cannot be assumed that faculty publications will correlate to

dissertations. Second, the role of coauthorships presents a challenge – you cannot count faculty

individually and then add their totals together or any coauthored paper is counted twice. Third,

the role of authorship meaning has to be considered because if the research is not originating in

the lab, should librarians be collecting for the project? In biology, the authors listed first are most

responsible for the writing of the article, and the last author is typically the PI. In between are

contributors of various levels of involvement, possibly honorary (Sonnenwald, 2007).

Sometimes authorships are given as gratitude for providing funding, and the listed author may

have had little intellectual contribution to the paper (McSherry, 2003). Finally, this method is

highly dependent on the social structure of the group. In fields that do not have this years-long

research residency, where the doctoral student depends on faculty for the materials necessary to

complete research, the correlation of journal usage would most likely be weaker.

This study covers a long period of time specifically to smooth out gaps in publication or

dissertation completion. Given the results of the current study, a time period should be selected

so that all faculty research groups are represented for any local collection assessment, or groups

should be examined individually. Faculty departures and arrivals are excellent opportunities for

examining collections. A retiring faculty member may end an entire branch of local research,


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making previously highly ranked journals less critical. Similarly, new hires will generally have a

citation record when they arrive, allowing librarians to gain insight into their needs. Presenting

quantitative data about which journals faculty cite and where they are likely to publish can be a

highly effective way to engage in outreach and liaison work with faculty in the physical sciences.

The literature review suggests that as students progress through their education, their journal

usage more and more closely resembles faculty usage. From weak correlation at the

undergraduate level (Joswick & Stierman, 1997; Kraus, 2005), to somewhat stronger correlation

at master’s level (Zipp, 1996) to the strongest correlation here comparing a doctoral student to

the graduate advisor. Examining serials usage at the level of the research group gives librarians

better guidance for collection development decisions than examining the department as a whole.

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Table 1: Summary of Data Collected

Group nDissertations

Advised

Faculty Publications with Cited Refences

Journal Titles Used Total To Journals

Percent Journal

citationsAll Advisorsa 16 85 378 810 13968 12470 89.28%All Faculty 29 — 464 1071 16736 15155 90.55%

All Dissertationsb 85 — — 940 14474 12628 87.25%

References

a Groups C&D were co-advisors on one dissertation. Due to coauthorships, individual advisor counts do not add up to the advisor total.b One dissertation of group B was not available for counting due to embargo.


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Table 2: Summary Statistics for DPS Research Groups, 2006-2011

Faculty Group

Dissertations Advised

Faculty Publications

w/ Cited References

Total Cited References to Journals

Different Journal Titles Used

Mean Group citations per publication

Faculty Advisees Faculty Advisees Faculty Output Dissertations

A 12 35 1305 1733 154 235 37 144 B 10 79 3230 1535 293 225 41 154 C 8 51 1797 1100 233 200 35 138 D 9 17 597 1587 131 250 35 176 E 6 34 748 615 183 151 22 103 F 3 40 1618 1191 162 169 40 397 G 9 24 579 1308 150 256 24 145 H 5 40 1478 510 95 62 37 102 I 5 7 81 400 18 68 12 80 J 5 40 877 903 171 178 22 181 K 3 9 375 527 94 113 42 176 L 4 8 304 497 90 120 38 124 M 2 21 835 224 107 72 40 112 N 2 13 381 234 49 49 29 117 O 1 8 297 159 74 50 37 159 P 2 23 754 316 143 71 33 158

Median 5 24 751 571 137 136 36 145

Note. DPS = Department of Polymer Science. Groups with more than 500 citations for both faculty and advisees are in boldface.


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Table 3: Kendall's Tau-b Correlations for Advisor Publications

GroupAll

DissertationsAll

AdvisorsAll

FacultyGroup

Advisees...all

dissertations ...all facultyA 0.367* 0.436* 0.403* 0.460* 0.093 0.057B 0.348* 0.536* 0.473* 0.476* 0.128 0.003C 0.304* 0.442* 0.378* 0.608* 0.304 0.230D 0.306* 0.373* 0.336* 0.570* 0.264 0.234E 0.235* 0.382* 0.326* 0.448* 0.213 0.122F 0.298* 0.402* 0.359* 0.590* 0.292 0.231G 0.225* 0.338* 0.287* 0.415* 0.190 0.128H 0.212* 0.306* 0.265* 0.696* 0.484 0.431I 0.129* 0.136* 0.118* 0.452* 0.323 0.334J 0.246* 0.390* 0.343* 0.463* 0.217 0.120K 0.254* 0.320* 0.291* 0.619* 0.365 0.328L 0.197* 0.298* 0.262* 0.373* 0.176 0.111M 0.319* 0.376* 0.344* 0.390* 0.071 0.046N 0.237* 0.259* 0.242* 0.414* 0.177 0.172O 0.227* 0.281* 0.252* 0.490* 0.263 0.238P 0.327* 0.381* 0.339* 0.496* 0.169 0.157

Means 0.264 0.354 0.314 0.498 0.233 0.184All Dissertations 1.000* 0.396* 0.247* —

All advisor 0.396* 1.000* 0.780* —All Faculty 0.247* 0.780* 1.000* —

*p < 0.001.

Correlation of faculty publications with…Increase in correlation to

group advisees from…

Note. Comparison of ranked lists of journal titles (n = 1422). Groups with more than 500 citations for both faculty and advisees are in boldface.


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Table 5: Correlation of Top 100 Ranked Journal Titles Journal Citations from…

Journal Titles n Correlation w/

All Dissertations Dissertations Faculty

Publications Top 100a 103 0.633* 9735 11949

All 1422 0.247* 12628 15155

Top 100 Percentage of journal titles 11.0% 9.6% Top100 percentage of all journal citations 77.1% 78.8%

Note. This is a correlation of the top 100 most frequently cited journal titles among faculty who advised a dissertation. a Four titles were tied for rank 100, so 103 titles are used. * p < 0.001.


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Table 6: Usage Comparison of DPS Faculty 50 Most Cited journals

Journal name Rank Count Rank Count Rank CountMacromolecules 1 1945 1 1842 1 1659J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 2 749 2 619 2 675Phys. Rev. Lett. 3 532 3 512 4 452Polymer 4 475 5 412 6 356J. Chem. Phys. 5 471 4 449 3 523J. Polym. Sci. Part A: Polym. Chem. 6 370 10 247 5 372J. Rheology 7 346 6 345 20 118Science 8 340 7 315 8 272J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 9 289 8 268 11 188Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 10 280 9 260 9 197J. Phys. Chem. B 11 252 13 176 14 166Langmuir 12 248 11 186 7 304Nature 13 206 12 181 10 190Chem. Rev. 14 180 19 130 18 131Adv. Mater. 15 170 16 141 18 131Chem. Commun. 16 156 15 145 21 114Chem. Mater. 16 156 14 147 22 105J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 18 154 22 119 17 137Phys. Rev. B 19 148 18 135 13 173Rubber Chem. Tech. 20 140 21 120 12 185J. Appl. Phys. 21 138 17 137 15 143Phys. Rev. E 22 133 20 128 23 104Biomaterials 23 132 46 52 68 30Appl. Phys. Lett. 24 122 23 115 16 141Adv. Polym. Sci. 25 117 26 108 30 78Chem.--Eur. J. 25 117 24 114 31 77Rheologica Acta 27 112 25 112 40 62PNAS 28 109 28 88 33 72J. Catal. 29 107 472 1 389 2Biophys. J. 30 102 27 93 41 61Prog. Polym. Sci. 31 87 33 70 27 80Acc. Chem. Res 32 86 29 80 32 76Macromol. Rapid Commun. 33 83 30 79 33 72J. Org. Chem. 34 79 31 74 25 94Organometallics 35 78 94 18 70 28ACS Polymer Preprints 36 77 35 68 28 79Anal. Chem. 37 75 38 61 65 33J. Non-Newt. Fluid Mech. 38 73 32 73 65 33Biomacromolecules 39 72 37 63 67 32J. Non-Cryst. Solids 40 69 34 69 43 58Eur. Polym. J. 41 68 41 57 46 50Europhys. Lett. 42 65 36 64 48 49J. Phys. Chem. 42 65 45 53 24 97J. Mater. Chem. 44 64 40 59 49 48J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 45 62 39 60 44 56Nano Lett. 45 62 42 55 33 72Macromol. Chem. Phys. 47 59 48 50 45 53Inorg. Chem. 48 58 42 55 26 84Dalton Transactions 49 56 49 48 28 79Soft Matter 49 56 44 54 183 7

Faculty Advisors Dissertations

Note.!DPS!=!Department!of!Polymer!Science.!Data!is!for!citation!counts!of!publications!from!2006:2011.!Faculty!=!Journal!citations!from!all!faculty!publications!in!DPS.!Advisors!=!Journal!citations!from!all!faculty!publications!who!advised!a!dissertation.!Dissertations!=!Journal!citations!from!all!DPS!dissertations!available!(one!dissertation!was!not!used!due!to!publication!embargo).!Rank!=!ordinal!rank!of!journals,!highest!Count!first.!Count!=!raw!citation!count.!


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Journal usage at department and research group level ...

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