Electronic Journals: How User Behavior is Changing

From 1977 through 2001 the authors have conducted a series of studies that examine reading and publishing habits of scientists in both university and non-university settings (including private companies and national laboratories). For the last decade the studies have measured the influence of ejournals on scholarly reading and publishing behaviours. These studies demonstrate that scientists continue to read widely from scholarly journals primarily for research and current awareness. Reading of scholarly articles has increased to approximately 120-13 articles per person per year, with engineers reading fewer journal articles on the average and medical faculty reading more. A growing amount of these readings come from eprints and other separate copies. A greater percentage of readings are now of new articles and readings from electronic journals are more likely to be of current articles. Approximately half to all of scientists in a discipline now use electronic journals at least part of the time, with considerable variations among disciplines. On the average, nearly one-third of journal articles read now come from electronic journals or digital databases. Evidence suggests that scientists are reading from a broader range of journals than in the past, influenced by timely electronic publishing and by growth in bibliographic searching and interpersonal communication as means of identifying and locating evident that the value scientists place on the information found in scholarly journal articles, whether electronic or print, remains high.