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210 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

Exploring the user platform preference and user interest preference of
Chinese scholarly articles: A comparison based on usage metrics
〇a*
CHEN Bikun〇, ZHOU Huixian, ZHONG Zhouyan & WANG Yuefen
With the rapid progress of networking and digitization, interactive data of users on various
platforms have been recorded in real time. It has promoted the rise and development of usage
metrics that provided new ideas and methods for users’ academic communication behavior research
and decision-making applications. Also, various Chinese academic literature databases have been
increasingly utilized by users who are in need for high-quality information service, which can be
promoted by usage metrics on user usage patterns.
In order to comparatively investigate the usage patterns of journal official sites and pay-for-
access platform and then to support decision-making, this study selected academic papers,
published in 2014-2015 of 61 Chinese open access journals indexed by CSSCI and CSCD in eight
disciplines, “Library, Information and Archival Science” “Management Science” “Economics”
“Pedagogy” “Computer Science” “Earth Science” “Math” “Biology”, and explored Chinese usage
patterns from user platform preferences’ aspect and user interest preferences’ aspect by analyzing
usage data of journal official sites and pay-for-access platforms. Operatively, comparisons of
user platform preferences were implemented by descriptive statistics and correlation analysis and
comparisons of user interest preferences were explored by Jaccard similarity coefficient and co-
word analysis.
Firstly, it proved that there were differences in user platform preferences between journal official
sites and pay-for-access platforms. From the perspective of discipline, users tended to use journal
official sites rather than pay-for-access platforms to obtain papers, and the paper downloads of
social science were higher than natural science in pay-for-access platforms. From the perspective
of journals, social science users were more inclined to use pay-for-access platforms than natural
science users to obtain papers. Compared with pay-for-access platforms, the paper downloads
of journal official sites showed a more obvious Matthew effect. The paper downloads of journal
official sites showed a lower correlation with pay-for-access platforms overall. Secondly, it proved
that there were differences in user interest preferences between journal official sites and pay-for-
access platforms. The top 20% most downloaded papers in journal official sites and pay-for-access
platforms showed a lower Jaccard similarity. In the example of library, information and literature
science, the users of journal official sites and pay-for-access platforms paid attention to different
topics respectively.
In a word, this study tried to comparatively investigate the usage patterns and its influencing
factors by analyzing the usage data of Chinese journal official sites and pay-for-access platforms.
However, the factors that affect the usage patterns were very complicated. How to probe into the
mechanism of influencing factors and then verify them was still an important problem to be solved
* Correspondence should be addressed to CHEN Bikun, Email: chenbikun@njust.edu.cn, ORCID:0000-0002-7252-3906