Page 149 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

ZHAO Xing / Exploring the measurement features of usage data for academic literature 149

of each record on the same platform. As a matter of fact, if the WoS platform can further open
the time, geography, source and other information of user usage data, the platform would provide
an exciting and broad space for academic exchange and research on information behavior. What
should be emphasized here is that in the current phase, the subjective and objective conditions of
usage and other similar user data are not mature enough for them to challenge the status of citation
data on academic evaluation, as they are supposed to be oriented as a supplement to citation data,
which further serve as a supplement to, not a substitute for, peer review. The creative contributions
made by Garfield should be remembered by academia, and his exploratory approach, driven by the
development of new data and new platforms, has pointed out the path for the future development
of bibliometrics.
Although there are still a few limitations, the magnitude data for the academic literature of the
WoS platform has provided new referential data and a new field of vision since its emergence for
bibliometrics, academic information behavior, academic information retrieval and many other
fields. It is of vital significance and high potential. If citation can be described in most cases as
voting by counterpart experts via the publication of articles, then usage can be largely deemed as
the attentive record kept by general peers through the acquisition of literature information as the
counting method. As a different aspect of academic influence, citation mainly reflects recognition
and accumulation under academic topics whilst usage mainly characterizes the attention to and
interest in the knowledge of specific fields. On the whole, the usage of the WoS platform satisfies
the requirement of “unified and normalized data, repeatedly verifiable (to some extent)” raised
by bibliometrics. The usage belongs to intensive sampling in data construction and approaches
random sampling in user composition. Data such as this measure the front-end usage behavior of
users, and constitute a more fundamental and grassroots characterization of academic influence.
Being more sensitive to academic frontiers, hot spots or time, the data represent a potential logical
starting point for the generation of citations.
The basic theories and quantitative features of usage explored in this paper can serve as reference
for future research, and imply that, under the premise of conforming to some bibliometric theories,
usage may have new empirical features and is worthy of detailed discussion at various levels
of analysis. Future research can be built on the three aspects of influence dimension, discipline
difference and behavioral motive. For the influence dimension, efforts can be made to investigate
usage as a supplementary influence perspective, including the feasibility and realization approach
of a formal academic evaluation system, and explorations can be conducted under a multi-
dimensional hierarchical analysis framework (Zhao Tan, & Ye, 2012). For discipline difference,
the quantitative features in specific disciplines can be studied and defined. For behavioral motive,
the interaction between numerical formation mechanisms and academic information behavior can
be explored for usage. In conclusion, the emergence of the usage data of the WoS platform can be
expected to play a promising role in driving the further expansion of research data and the field of
vision in related fields.