Page 132 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

Exploring the measurement features of usage data for

academic literature 〇a ①

*
ZHAO Xing〇b〇
1.Department of Information Management, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University,
Shanghai 200241, China
2. Institute for Academic Evaluation and Development, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China

Abstract
The emergence of new data has always been a major force driving the advance of informetrics. The
magnitude of data usage for academic literature, given by the Web of Science (WoS), can be expected to
provide a supplementary perspective for citation analysis in three theoretical aspects, which are influence
dimension, discipline difference and behavioral motive. Based on 166,767 articles in physics, computer
science, economics, and Library and Information Science included by SCI and SSCI in 2013 as research
samples, this paper conducts an exploratory investigation into the measurement features of the usage
data. According to the results, compared with citation data, usage is more discriminative and sensitive. In
terms of distribution, usage presents an approximate and positively skewed distribution at high-frequency.
An approximate power-law distribution is observed in the cumulative integral. The evaluation result
of usage is independent to a certain degree and poses no essential opposition to the result of citation.
Although the usage of the WoS platform still has the limitations of generality, falsifiability and isolation,
usage may be accepted as one of the possible options that supplement citation data and provide a richer
field of vision for influence evaluation. There are 4 figures, 6 tables and 23 references in this paper.

Keywords
Bibliometrics, Usage data, Academic evaluation, Citation analysis, Information behavior

0 Introduction

Bibliometrics, based on citation analysis as its core method, constitutes one of the featured fields
in Library and Information Science. As far as the achievements of the application of bibliometrics
are concerned, most of the achievements are closely related to the development of new platforms
and data. For instance, the Science Citation Index (SCI) created by Eugene Garfield, who recently
passed away, built up the evaluation status of the impact factor in early years and has driven the
rapid development of the H-index. However, controversies over citation analysis and its related
data are still widely reported (Seglen, 1993; Bar-Ilan, 2008; Ye, 2010). To be specific, controversies
mainly emerge in two aspects. In the theoretical aspect, there are indeed some limitations with the

① Special contribution for the Youth Academic Forum sponsored by this Journal.
This article is an outcome of the youth project “The Mechanism and Empirical Study of h-Type Information Network Measures”
(No.71503083) supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to ZHAO Xing, Email:xzhao@infor.ecnu.edu.cn, ORCID:0000-0001-9347-590X