Page 101 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

100 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

program would be employed to find out whether the publishing year of the sample citation hits the
temporal coverage of the counterpart. A hit means successful access to the cited reference when a
certain local user generated a literature need. In other words, the cited reference was available in
certain journal resource(s). On the contrary, a miss signifies access failure to the cited reference in
any of the three resources, or the incapacity of library collections to serve the information needs.
2) If either the title field or the ISSN (or eISSN) field is a match, a procedure of manual check is
inevitable. 3) Dual matching failure implies that the library cannot provide the needed cited reference.
Theoretically, the improved citation checking method should save labor costs enormously and
reduce the study error caused by title anomaly and data inaccuracy. In the meanwhile, merits are
embodied in this method as volume number insensitivity and multi-field-matching algorithm.
Hence, researchers can apply this method to a large sample more accurately. This study adopted
this method, after which the validation of it was testified as well.

2 Results and findings

Citing 72 570 references, 2 186 literature whose first author is from the Wuhan University were
indexed by SCIE, SSCI or A&HCI in 2013. 72 513, or 99.92% of all the cited references were
identified after data cleaning and backtracking. Therein, 66 968 journal citations were regarded as
valid sample citations in this study, accounting for 92.28% of the total citations from the sample.
Up to 6 970 journals were cited, 9.61 times each on average. The publishing year of the cited
sources spans from 1805 to 2014. 25 394 cited references of sample citations were published after
2009, which means the Price index is 37.92%.
For convenience, some rules are made hence. 1) The literature resource cited by the sample is
named “cited reference”, and the journal on which the cited reference was published is named
“source journal”. 2) E, P, and OA stands for electronic, print and OA resources severally for short.
“∪” is a union operator applied for the union operation between the three resources. The union
set means a joint resource of the set elements which belong to E or P or OA or to all. Accordingly,
the union set embodies the capability of literature guarantee of the Wuhan University Library. 3)
An indicator named “average cited frequency” (ACF) of journal is introduced to demonstrate the
scholarship of a congregation of journals. ACF is a ratio of the number of cited references to the
number of source journals in given conditions.

2.1 Availability study

Availability statistics of electronic, print and OA journals are shown in Table 1. “No. of source
journals” indicates the number of the journal which issued the cited reference of the sample
citations once at least. Another situation to note is that one source journal may guarantee some