Page 99 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

098 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.11, 2019

Exploring the user platform preference and user

interest preference of Chinese scholarly articles: A
comparison based on usage metrics 〇a〇 ①

〇b *
CHEN Bikun〇 , ZHOU Huixian, ZHONG Zhouyan & WANG Yuefen
Department of Information Management, School of Economics & Management, Nanjing University of Science &
Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210094, China

Abstract
In order to comparatively investigate usage patterns of journal official sites and pay-for-access platform
and then to support decision-making, this study selected academic papers, published during 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” and “Biology”. Chinese usage patterns in user platform preferences
and user interest preferences were explored by analyzing usage data from 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. It proved that there were differences in
user platform preferences and user interest preferences between journal official sites and pay-for-access
platforms. However, factors that affect usage patterns were very complicated. How to probe into the
mechanism of contributory factors and then verify them was still an important problem to be solved in
further study.

Keywords
Academic literature, Usage data, Usage metrics, Academic journals, Academic communication,
Usage pattern

0 Introduction

With the rapid progress of networking, digitization and other related technologies, researchers
are increasingly inclined to acquire digital academic literature through the Internet, which makes
academic literature’s usage data (counts of HTML views and PDF downloads (X.W. Wang, Mao,
& Z. Wang, 2014)) able to be recorded in the digital format. In this context, researchers collect,
organize and analyze usage data to discover characteristics and laws of user behavior, or explore
the correlation between different usage data, which is coined as “Usage Metrics” in scientometrics.
In research of scientific literature exchange and utilization, collecting and analyzing data of

① This article is an outcome of the key project “Theory and Method Research of Data Science Towards Knowledge Innovation
Service”（No.16ZDA224) supported by National Social Science Foundation of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to CHEN Bikun, Email: chenbikun@njust.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-7252-3906