Page 98 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Xincai WANG, Haining WANG / Empirical study on journal literature guarantee of academic library: A case study of Wuhan University 097

the meanwhile. Externally, academic libraries seized the opportunity to expand knowledge sources by
integrating open access (OA) journals in the emerging trend of open access initiative (OAI).
The rising acceptance of e-only policy and OAI transforms the collection composition in
academic libraries. Accordingly, the roles of electronic, print and OA journals as part of a library’s
journal holdings have become different from the past. 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 OA environment as well as discusses how
the development of OA journals has impacted the collection development 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.

1 Sample construction and methodology

1.1 Sample construction

Some points should be noted in serving for the goal of this study. 1) The sample should be
representative and up-to-date scientific outputs, so as to provide guidelines for the development of
research and comprehensive collection (The Library of Congress, 2015). 2) Guarantee of the local
use has long been regarded as an important indicator of collection quality (Emerson, 1957; Griscom,
1983; Haycock, 2013). Thus, the sample should be constructed to represent the local patrons’ needs
of Wuhan University. 3) The sample should be large enough in quantity and continuous in a time
span, in which the collection undergoes barely alteration. Taking the above factors into consideration,
the sample of this research was drawn from the articles whose first author is from Wuhan University.
And, the sample should be issued in 2013 and indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE),
Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI).
The specific process of data acquisition and preprocessing is as follows. Firstly, the authors
set the timespan to year 2013, and searched “WUHAN UNIV” by “Organization-Enhanced”
field in “Basic Search” of Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection (including SCIE, SSCI, and
A&HCI only). With the aid of Microsoft Office Excel Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the
bibliography, of which the first author is from Wuhan University, and its abbreviated citations
were selected and listed. Secondly, by referring to Cited Reference Search of WoS, the authors
trailed abbreviated citations back to their original form and classified them founded on the type of
material. If the correct field of original citations were uncertain, then they were verified by original
texts or standard bibliographies such as Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) WorldCat and
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) services. Periodical citing references, named sample citations, were
extracted for the following research. Thirdly, missing fields of sample citations were checked and
testified. Therefore, comprehensive data, such as the title, ISSN, eISSN, publishing year, volume,
issue, page, DOI, and access address were embedded in the fields of sample citations. Fourthly,