QQML 2013, Roma

1. 5th International Conference on Qualitative and
Quantitative Methods in Libraries
4 - 7 June 2013, "La Sapienza" University, Rome Italy
The impact of the Online Knowledge Library: its use and impact on
the production of the Portuguese academic and scientific community
(2000-2010)
Teresa Costa, Carlos Lopes and Francisco Vaz

2. • In recent years several initiatives have taken place to promote
universal access to the Information and Knowledge Society
• In 2004 the Online Knowledge Library (b-on) was launched in
Portugal. With it, it became easier to get access to full text
international scientific publications.
• With almost ten years of existence it seems appropriate to:
o evaluate the usefulness and availability of electronic collections provided
by b-on evaluating the real needs of users through the analysis of usage
statistics,
o seek to achive the usefulness of this quantitative and qualitative increase
of the electronic information has had at the level of the Portuguese
scientific output between 2000 and 2010.
Beginning

3. • With the advent of the electronic resources the cooperation between
libraries was reinforced with their association in consortia to
negotiate better contracts.
• This practice was especially developed between academic libraries,
since these Institutions are the ones with greater usage of the
available electronic contents.
Portuguese consortium
With this study we present and analyse some statistical
/bibliometrical indicators of the Portuguese Scientific output
seeking to associate them with the emergence of the Portuguese
consortium

4. As the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL, 2010)
the analysis of resource usage is not significant if not in connection
with the results, students learning and researchers production. The
interest lies in measuring the impact of the library on their users.
• The objectives of this study are:
o determine the usage that universities teachers and researchers make of
the online scientific information offered by b-on;
o identify and characterize the scientific output of universities linking it
with the increased usage of b-on’s resources;
o measure the level of relevance and the use of online sources;
o and identify the scientific subject areas with major output as well as
main titles indexed in WoS with Portuguese affiliation.
Objectives

5. • We analysed:
o the usage of b-on resources by the public universities members
of the consortium from 2004 to 2010 (we chose as sample the
five universities with more downloads per FTE - full time
equivalent).
o In addition to the usage data of the consortium, we used the Web
of Science (WoS) from which we identified the articles indexed
by the five Portuguese universities affiliated between 2000-2010.
o We identified the scientific production per subject area,
international cooperation and scientific journals with the highest
number of published articles, among others.
Methods

6. In 2010 b-on gave access to more than 19.000 journals, 18.000 e-books
and 12.000 conference proceedings in full text, covering of the several
scientific subject areas
Fig.1 - Annual evolution of the number of b-on’s titles (2004-2010)
Online Knowledge Library: contents

7. In terms of the use of resources b-on has been growing year by year,
reaching in 2010 almost 7 millions of downloads.
Fig.2 - Evolution of downloads (2004-2010)
B-on’s downloads

8. The five public universities with more downloads per FTE are:
Table 1 - The five universities with more downloads/ FTE per year (2004-2010)
After the identification of the institutions with greater usage statistics, the
search strategy consisted in the recovery of all articles indexed in WoS,
where the affiliation was 'Portugal' (i.e., where the author’s institutional
address was Portugal) between the years 2000 and 2010 originated from
the five public universities.
Universities with more usage

9. The number of articles with Portuguese affiliation has gradually increased
in recent years. We found:
• 79.192 articles indexed in WoS, with at least one Portuguese author, published in the
years under analysis.
• 40.413 have affiliation in at least one of the five universities considered in this study
(51%).
Fig.3 - Evolution of Portuguese scientific articles indexed in Web of Science (2000-2010)
The growth rate of the number of articles with Portuguese affiliation and from the five
universities was more than 300% between 2000 and 2010.
Portuguese scientific articles indexed in WoS

10. The growth rate of the number of citations to Portuguese articles was of
415%, and the in the case of the five universities was of 500%.
Fig. 4 - Evolutionof citationsto scientificarticlesindexedinWeb of Science (2000-2010)
Citations count
The increase of the number of citations is exponential.

11. International collaboration
The major international collaborations is with the USA and Spain
Fig.5 - International collaboration in research (2000-2010)

12. The top 5 research areas are the same for Portugal and for the
universities in studie.
• Chemistry, Physics and Engineering (representing 35% of total of
Portuguese articles in WoS between 2000 and 2010).
Top 5 research areas
Fig.6 - Top 5 research areas (2000-2010)

13. Publications
It is not surprising that English is the most used language to disseminate the
national research outputs.
Title PT 5 Univ
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 740 428
Materials Science Forum 497 312
Physical Review D 496 357
Allergy 424 8
European Heart Journal 414 -
Physics Letters B 251 170
Journal of Physical Chemistry B 302 161
In our case it’s interesting that the first three titles are the same in both cases.
Fig. 7 - WoS indexed publications with more Portuguese articles (2000-2010)

14. • As anticipated we confirmed that the type of institution with more
downloads are universities. These institutions are also the ones with more
articles indexed in the WoS.
• We believe that the availability of electronic resources contributes to the
higher productivity of universities.
• Intensive use of e-journals is a reliable indicator of future research success
and has resulted in changes in the scientific communication model.
• Chemistry is the research subject are with more output, and the Portuguese
Chemicals sector researchers show a clear preference for publication in
international journals and believe this is reflected in the increased visibility
of this area research.
• The general trend is to an increase of publications of Portuguese authors /
researchers in scientific journals, although the percentage in the social
sciences remains much lower than that of science and technology
Conclusions

15. Q&A
teresa.costa.23@gmail.com