Page 144 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

144 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

count basically satisfy the relationship of usage count＞citation count, except that 5.2% of the
sample articles in physics, 7.7% in computer science, 1.84% in economics and 0.39% in Library
and Information Science show the contrary. According to Figure 4, similarly to the imbalance in
citation, in usage count, some articles have more prominent usage advantages. For instance, the
usage counts of ten physics articles exceeded 1,000, and those of four computer science articles
exceeded 500. A comparison between the usage and citation counts also reveals that inside a
specific discipline, the value difference of usage is greater than that of citation, which once again
testifies to the higher discriminability of usage.

Figure 4. Comparison among four disciplines in terms of usage count and citation count
(by the descending order of usage count).

On the other hand, considering that citation is an academic evaluation method with a certain
degree of recognition in statistics, usage should not create any dichotomy with citation in the
statistical sense; otherwise, it will fall into the logical trap of “either this or that”. A new index with
both novelty and robustness is supposed to have a “neither friendly nor aloof ” association with
the traditional index, so a certain degree of statistical positive correlation between the two indexes
is relatively ideal. According to the results of Pearson and Spearman’s correlation analysis on the