Page 147 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

ZHAO Xing / Exploring the measurement features of usage data for academic literature 147

the seventh place analyzes patents and articles via the information visualization tools, Aureka
and CiteSpace, of Library and Information Science. The citation counts of the two articles are
respectively 5 and 2, which are relatively low as well.
It is thus evident that the influences of research topics on citation and usage are not completely
consistent. According to the data in Table 5, among the pieces of literature with a high usage count,
those articles related to social media tend to have a relatively high citation count whilst those
related to public libraries, as well as the applications of discipline methods and theories, tend to
have less prominent citation counts. This also provides microscopic evidence of the certain degree
of independence enjoyed by citation and usage in evaluation.
Further analyzing the “double-high” articles (articles with high usage and high citation counts)
shows that seven of the ten admitted articles are closely related to social media (see Table 6).
Thus, a themed research study clearly has both theoretical novelty and extensive application
practice, so the study can be expected to have both high usage and citation counts. On the other
hand, in the literature of the discipline of Library and Information Science, there are articles that
have zero citations, but a relatively high usage count. These articles are mostly applied research
studies focusing on case analyses or policy suggestions in a specific field. A typical example
would be “Putting Research into Practice: An Exploration of Sheffield iSchool Approaches to
Connecting Research with Practice”, which takes specific institutions as examples and discusses
ways of strengthening the relationship between academic research and practice. The citation

Table 6. “Double-high” articles (high usage count and high citation count) among research articles in the discipline
of Library and Information Science included by SSCI in 2013
No. Top articles in usage Usage Citation

Bridging the qualitative-quantitative divide: Guidelines for conducting mixed methods research in
1 115 27
information systems
2 Emotions and information diffusion in social media-sentiment of Microblogs and sharing behavior 168 25
A preliminary test of Google scholar as a source for citation data: A longitudinal study of Nobel
3 108 25
prize winners
4 Citation time window choice for research impact evaluation 105 25
Social media brand community and consumer behavior: Quantifying the relative impact of user-
5 392 22
and marketer-generated content
6 Social media and firm equity value 172 21
7 To be or not to be in social media: How brand loyalty is affected by social media? 203 20
8 Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry 133 18
9 Not all my friends need to know: A qualitative study of teenage patients, privacy, and social media 115 18
Social network effects on productivity and job security: Evidence from the adoption of a social
10 131 16
networking tool
notes: “Double-high” denotes the articles in the set of high cited articles (top 50) and their usages are in top 10 in this set.