Page 97 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Empirical study on journal literature guarantee of

academic library: A case study of Wuhan University

Xincai WANG 1, 21 ∗ & Haining WANG 2, 3

1 Wuhan University Library, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
2 School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
3 Chinese PLA 66079 Unit, Beijing 101413, China

Abstract
The rising acceptance of e-only policy and open access initiative transforms the collection composition
in academic libraries. Accordingly, the roles of electronic, print and open access journals as part of
a library’s journal holdings have become different from the past, which needs to be brought to the
forefront. Samples of this research are drawn from the articles whose first author is from Wuhan
University. They should be issued in 2013 and indexed by SCIE, SSCI or A&HCI. The authors
introduced an improved citation checking method to the study by matching the journal cited references
of the sample with the journals from print, electronic collections and the world’s major open access
databases that are available at the Wuhan University Library in accordance with the publishing year
instead of the volume number. Thus, the availability and unavailability of the source journals in open
access, electronic, and print journal resources can be examined and compared in a comprehensive
manner. By comparing the effectiveness of these three formats of resources as the reference source of
published articles, this article attempts to analyze their features and tendencies under the current open
access environment as well as discusses how the development of open access journals has impacted the
collection building of university libraries in China, so as to provide enlightenment and reference for
academic libraries to optimize their resource provision and meet the patrons’ current needs.

Keywords
Academic library, Literature guarantee, Collection development, Electronic journal, Print journal, Open
access journal, Citation checking

0 Introduction

With its mission and value in mind, academic libraries endeavour to build collections supporting
teaching and scientific research. However, “academic journal crisis” has exerted a negative effect on
scholarly communication and knowledge dissemination due to worldwide price rising of scientific
periodicals. To provide journals in a more economical and reasonable manner, academic libraries have
been seeking solutions from the internal and external perspectives. Internally, academic libraries pruned
format duplications of academic journals according to overlap analysis, and embraced e-only policy in

* Correspondence should be addressed to Xincai WANG, Email: wangxincai@163.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-3960-1343