Analysis of the downward trend
in document supply in pharmacology: a case study from INIST in
Chérifa
Boukacem-Zeghmouri
Pascal Bador
Thierry Lafouge
Hélène Prost
Joachim Schöpfel
Keywords
Document supply, Impact Factor, Serials, Electronic
Resources, Longitudinal Study, INIST
Abstract
Purpose: The article investigates the evolution of
document supply of print serials.
Approach: The study is based
on data from INIST-CNRS – document supply requests and access to electronic
resources – of 95 serials with JCR impact factors in pharmacology. Data were collected from 1992 to 2003.
Findings: The results distinguish
four groups of serials each with a different evolution of supply requests.
Nevertheless, the overall decline from 1999 is a global phenomenon linked to
growing access to online journals and there seems little likelihood of a
slowdown for the next few years.
Originality: This is the first of three articles
on a longitudinal study over 12 years on different aspects of the relationship
between document supply and impact factor (citations) in pharmacology, a
scientific domain with a high use of scientific information.
1. Introduction, context and
issues
This paper is the outcome of a study conducted by a group of researchers
and professionals from different disciplines on a particular issue: trends in
indicators concerning scientific serials as a vehicle for disseminating
traditional scientific information, in the context of digital libraries.
Two further papers are to be released, pursuing our analysis of the
results obtained after processing the data to which we had access. The first of
these papers will focus on the growing dissociation of document orders from
citations, as reflected by online search data. The second will analyse trends
in demand for pharmaceutical journals from INIST customers.
We should point out here that this paper is not the first to address
this theme, since it reflects an ongoing debate on flows of scientific
information as recorded since 2000 by INIST, the leading French document supply
service (Schöpfel, 2003).
Working from a well-defined corpus of journals requested through
document supply systems, our previous
publications (Bador and Petit, 1998, Bador et al., 2000 and 2002), essentially
focused on the relevance of the well known bibliometric indicator known as the
“impact factor”, in a print environment. Using the results of these studies, we
were able to measure the, sometimes relative, importance of the impact factor
within a scientific community and thus to pinpoint its relative influence on
patterns in INIST article requests. These results also underlined INIST’s key
role in document suply in
As our discussions progressed, we broadened their scope to include the
present-day context, i.e., patterns in the circulation of scientific
information and their significance in the digital age.
The topic at issue relates to a question that has already been analysed
in the literature: the downward trend in supply of print documents as compared
to the development of electronic resources (Goodier and Dean, 2004,
Figure 1: Articles
ordered from INIST, 1970 to 2005
These data show that demand for articles from INIST (in all fields)
began to slow down in 1999, with a particularly significant drop from 2001.
From 1999 to 2004, document supply decreased by 29%.
This downward trend in document supply had already been observed and
analysed in French university libraries (Boukacem, 2003 and 2004). The
different professional points of view on the subject were brought to the fore
during a meeting on document suply and interlibrary loan organized in
In seeking the reasons for this overall decline, a combination of
several factors must be considered which, since 1999, have helped to shape the
context in which the decline has occurred:
We can therefore make the assumption, for the purposes of our study,
that 1999 was the year when digital information broke away from print. Given
this macro-analysis of declining demand, our aim here is to perform a
micro-analysis in order to identify the factors associated with it.
However, as indicated earlier, we have restricted our analysis to the
well-defined field of pharmacology, both for the purpose of our study and
because this particular field is of interest per se because of its high
use of scientific information.
Our analysis drew on the statistical data processing performed for a
corpus of pharmaceutical journals from which single article copies had been
requested for 12 consecutive years from 1992 to 2003. This approach provided us
with an exhaustive and fully representative framework to analyse the context at
issue.
2. The
sample of 95 pharmaceutical journals
Our starting point was a corpus of
292 pharmaceutical journals selected during our study of quality criteria in
scientific journals, published in 1998 (Bador and Petit, 1998). Since our aim was to work on trends in INIST
supply of the most significant international pharmaceutical journals over
several years, we narrowed our selection to make up a representative sample.
To do so, we used the ISI database Journal
Citation Reports (JCR, www.isinet.com), an indispensable international
reference. From the selection of journals under the “Pharmacology and Pharmacy”
heading, we selected the 95 journals having an impact factor and a citation
half-life for the period from 1992 to 2003. These were also journals from which
copies of articles had been requested from INIST.
The INIST catalogue provided
bibliographic information for each journal: title, ISSN, publisher, country of
publication, language of publication, language of abstracts, URL, scientific
domain, external location and frequency. The INIST document supply database
provided the number of requests of single items for each journal per year,
together with information about customers.
3. The decline in INIST document supply orders
To address our chosen topic, we needed to consider a changing context
that cuts across the three subject areas that were essential to our analysis of
the corpus - orders for journal articles from INIST, trends in the supply of
electronic publications, and customer typology.
Based on the data supplied by INIST, we were able to represent trends in
demand for documents from our corpus of 95 international pharmaceutical
journals over 12 years (1992 to 2003).
Figure 2 indicates that the general decline in document ordering from
INIST also concerns orders for pharmaceutical journal articles.
A comparison of the curves in Figures 1 and 2 shows that in both cases,
the decline begins at the same time after the same peak in demand. Moreover, in
both cases, the decline is continuous and proportionately identical.
A closer analysis of the processed data from our sample of 95
pharmaceutical journals shows that, like the overall demand curve in Figure 1,
1999 was the critical year when demand, after increasing for several years (+5%
in 1999), went into a steady decline. From 1999 to 2004, INIST recorded a 33%
drop in orders for pharmaceutical articles.
The largest drop during this period (-10.5%) occurred in 2003 (see
Figure 2).
Figure 2: Pharmaceutical journal articles ordered from INIST, 1992 to
2003
4. Typology of the journals
We
decided to draw up a typology of the 95 journals in terms of ordering rates
(requests). In order to compare the evolution of requests between the different
journals, we first calculated the percentage of orders per year for each title,
and then a linear regression for each of the 95 order distributions over the
years from 1999 to 2003. We chose the year 1999 because, as explained above,
this was a critical year for the understanding of the decline in document
supply requests.
In the following, we describe briefly the statistical approach for this
analysis. For each journal of our sample, we draw a regression line fitting
best with the real evolution of the supply of requests from 1999 to 2003,
applying the mathematical procedure of the least squares. A visual comparison
of the result revealed more or less significant differences between this best-fitting
line and the points of the real curve. Therefore we determined how well the
regression fits by the widely used statistic called “coefficient of
determination” (Pearson test, “multiple correlation coefficient”), R2,
that explains how close the points are to the line, and then compared the results
with the standard statistical tables, in order to evaluate if the differences
were acceptable with a statistical risk of 5%.
Note that a coefficient <0 means decreasing orders, and a coefficient
>0 indicates increasing requests. We then ranked the 95 journals in
ascending order of the linear regression coefficient (see the table in annex),
as shown in Figure 3. The coefficient varies from -25% (average decline of
about 2% per year) to +10% (average increase of about 0.8% per year). Only one
journal, “Cardiovascular Drug reviews”, had an entirely atypical rate of
increase of more than 30%.
Figure
3: The 95 journals ranked by linear regression coefficient
Figure 3 clearly shows four groups of different sizes and characteristics:
All groups are described below.
To take our analysis further, we calculated
for each group the average regression coefficient and the coefficient of
variation that reflects the heterogeneous nature of the distribution (in
percentage). Additionally, we searched the sample serials in the French Union
Catalogue (SUDOC)[2] to
determine their presence and access in the French university and research
libraries.
4.1. Rapidly declining
requests
The first group contains four journals with a rapidly declining ordering
rate (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Group 1
journal orders, 1999 to 2003
The average coefficient of the 1st group is –0.02, i.e. a 2%
drop over 5 years, with a small statistical coefficient of variation of 7.3%.
The considerable drop in orders to INIST concerning three of the four
journals in this group (4% of the sample) is accounted for by the fact that
these titles were no longer issued in 1999-2003. The two journals for which
orders dropped most sharply, “Immunopharmacology” and “International Journal of
Immunopharmacology”, both published by Elsevier, merged in 2000 to become a new
title, “International Immunopharmacology”.
Similarly, the third journal, “Anticancer Drug Design” (from Macmillan)
was discontinued in 2001 and became a new journal entitled “Oncology Research,
an International Journal incorporating Anticancer Drug Design”. No particular
event was reported during the period under consideration for the fourth title,
“Journal of Controlled Release” (from Elsevier). The drop in the number of
orders in this case was undoubtedly due to the early availability (since the
first issue in 1984) of an electronic version of the journal.
4.2. Moderate decline of
requests
The second and most important group contains 79 journals with an
ordering rate in moderate decline. Its average coefficient is –0.0066, i.e. a
0.66% drop over 5 years, with a large statistical coefficient of variation of
51% (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Group 2 journal orders, 1999 to 2003 (sample of 4 journals)
This group of 79 journals (83% of our sample) with a moderate drop in
INIST orders since 1999 is the most representative (but also most
heterogeneous) group in the sample. Of the 79 journals, 12 are published by
Elsevier (15%).
The other publishers in the sample only publish 1 to 4 of the journals.
From 1999 to 2003, unlike those in Group 1, there were no mergers involving
journals in this group. Only three journals were discontinued, “Japanese
Journal of Pharmacology” (in 2002), “Quantitative Structure-Activity
Relationships” (in 2002), which became “QSAR and Combinatorial Science”,
and “Pharmacology and Toxicology” (in 2003). Among Group 2 journals, the
average moderate drop in INIST orders since 1999 is undoubtedly due to the
arrival of electronic versions.
All the studies that have analysed document supply on the electronic resources market agree that
1998-1999-2000 were the years when STM journals began to go online at a much
faster rate. These were also the years when academic suppliers of on-line
journals became more assertive and better organised. Finally, this was the time
when acquisition systems became much more highly structured, with the
development of consortia in North America, the
4.3. Slight increase of
requests
The third group contains 11 journals with a slight increase in ordering
rates (Figure 6):
Figure
6: Group 3 journal orders, 1999 to 2003 (sample of 4 journals)
The average coefficient of the 3rd group is 0.042, i.e. a
4.2% increase over 5 years, with an important statistical coefficient of
variation of 65% that indicates a rather heterogeneous category.
In this group of 11 journals (12% of our sample), orders in 1999-2003
were stable or increased slightly. As in Group 2, none of the journals were
involved in mergers and none were discontinued during the period. Again,
Elsevier leads the field with Wiley (2 journals), while the other major
publishers (Dekker, Springer, Thieme, Adis, Wiley, Blackwell) have only one
journal in the group.
4.4. High increase of
requests
Only one journal out of the 95, “Cardiovascular Drug Reviews”, is in the
group where INIST orders have increased considerably since 1999.
Figure 7: Group 4
journal orders, 1999 to 2003
The full text in electronic format has only been available since 1999
(free access) and since 2000 for subscribers. Only the print journal is
available in
4.5. Comparison of the groups
Figure 8 shows the average coefficient for these three groups. The
variation in Group 2 is exactly the same as the variation for all journals,
which is not surprising as Group 2 is representative of the entire corpus.
Figure 8: Average increase in orders for journals in Groups 1,2 and 3 (for
group 4, see figure7)
We should also point out that consistently high orders
are not linked to high subscription rates. Among the 88 titles where the
2005 subscription price is known, there is only one case where the two are
highly correlated: “International Journal of pharmaceutics” from Elsevier which
has the second highest subscription rate and which also ranks second in terms
of orders received by INIST in 2004.
5. Electronic publications:
supply and growth patterns
Most electronic resources are from the commercial
publishing sector where revenue and volume sales of electronic publications are
growing rapidly, especially in health and science (STM). In
this section, we outline the main supply-side characteristics, in order to
provide insights into the issues they raise in connection with the decline in
article orders from our document corpus.
The first wave of electronic document supply was a direct outcome of the
conclusions drawn by the TULIP[3]
experiment. The initial focus was for online versions of printed medical
journals, followed by scientific journals. After offering “previews” of journal
contents, publishers, with Elsevier in the lead, began to post the full text of
their print journals on line. Hypertext links soon became the main source of
added value for this new way of disseminating information.
Initially, the boom in electronic versions of print journals in
scientific, technical and medical fields (STM) – which include pharmaceuticals
– was closely linked to the new mode of production. The range of products on
offer grew rapidly. From 1997, the sector entered its “industrial age”
(Chartron, 2002). Elsevier, the pioneer in very broad product ranges (over 1000
titles), drew its own lessons from the critical mass generated by the TULIP
experiment, and entirely new electronic titles began to appear on the market
alongside electronic versions of print journals. The NewJour site reported an
overall increase of 9,846 journals in all disciplines from 1991 to 2001[4].
The French COUPERIN[5] consortium, with a corpus
similar to our own, offered in 2004 nearly 2,000 journal titles (Elsevier,
Springer Kluwer, Taylor and Francis, Thomson, Wiley) representing an
acquisition budget of 16 million euros and no less than 17 million annual full
text downloads.
Through its national portals, INIST
provides fee-paying or free access for public research laboratories to the electronic
versions of thousands of journals in all disciplines. Of these, 128 titles are
indexed as pharmacology serials.
6. Analysis of the decline
in orders by customer type
From the data supplied to us, we identified the customers who have
exerted the greatest influence on the overall drop of some 33% in orders for
articles from pharmaceutical journals.
This analysis produced a customer-based distribution of the decline in
orders, thus providing a better understanding of what has been happening.
During the period of decline we analysed (1999 to 2003), the largest
decline was in the public research sector. Orders from INSERM[6]
medical research, for example, dropped by 88% from the beginning to the end of
the period.
The drop for hospitals, which are among the most frequent customers, was
67 %. In higher education, a massive user of COUPERIN, requests dropped by 64%.
The CNRS[7]
laboratories come next, with a drop of 60%.
Requests from other French research organisations and individuals fell
by 44% and 45% respectively. Finally, requests from the corporate sector were
down by 26%.
These figures are consistent with the market trend towards online access
to scientific information. The major customer categories described above, where
orders are significantly lower, are categories that have opted for on-line
access to electronic journal portfolios, through consortiums or other access
systems, such as the BiblioINSERM portal[8].
Opting for services of this sort has often enabled this clientele to extend
their catalogues and reduce the use of print as well as associated delivery
times.
7. Conclusion
The decline in orders for pharmaceutical journal
articles from INIST is consistent with an overall downward trend in print
document supply, which in turn is a consequence of the rapid development of
electronic resources and multiple tools and points of access to these
resources.
Our study, which was based on a triple analysis of the
sector (article orders in pharmaceutics, customer typology and supply from
publishers), has led us to draw two main conclusions:
§
Our analysis demonstrates, on the
one hand, the impact on the print medium of policies and commercial strategies
for electronic scientific publications. The decline in document delivery orders
appears to be a symptom of the vertical structure and organisation of the
market for scientific information in pharmaceutics, rather than a consequence.
As can be seen from the journals in groups 1 and 2, takeovers and mergers
between commercial publishers, which entail the disappearance of certain
journals, changes in titles or switching to an electronic version only, mainly
affect “core titles” that are the most in demand.
§
Furthermore, mass online availability of electronic collections and the
organisation of fee-paying access systems – portals, consortia and so on – have
caused entire research communities to move away from print document supply and
the various time-related constraints they imply, and towards direct access. The
importance of direct access has changed the document search habits - and
therefore the ordering patterns – of an entire community. Regardless of its
intrinsic quality, a title also becomes important simply because it is
available on line.
Beyond our sample, it seems likely that the overall
decline of traditional document supply will continue because of the cumulated
effect of four factors: All STM publishers are developing the online media
(full-text databases). More and more collections are entirely available on the
Web (retrospective digitisation of the corpus back to Vol 1 No1). Search
engines are continuously improving the access to these materials (Google
effect). Finally, the pharmaceutical community, like other scientific
communities, changed their research practices from traditional library use to
the exploitation of digital resources, through online subscriptions (big deals)
or retrieval of freely available material (open access, repositories).
The forthcoming studies will focus on the
characteristics of our sample (journals) and of the requests (customers) in
order to give empirical evidence of the underlying dynamics of the evolution of
document supply.
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Annex: Orders
for articles from the 4 pharmaceutical journals in Group 1, 1999 to 2003
Journal |
99 |
00 |
01 |
02 |
03 |
Total orders 1992 - 2003 |
99 % |
00 % |
01 % |
02 % |
03 % |
REG 99 |
Quality |
IMMUNOPHARMACO |
96 |
118 |
88 |
42 |
27 |
917 |
10.5 |
12.9 |
9.6 |
4.6 |
2.9 |
-
2.33% |
0.78 |
INT
J IMMUNOPHARMACO |
140 |
86 |
64 |
55 |
25 |
1196 |
11.7 |
7.2 |
5.4 |
4.6 |
2.1 |
-
2.18% |
0.93 |
J
CONTROL RELEASE |
522 |
480 |
344 |
214 |
249 |
3901 |
13.4 |
12.3 |
8.8 |
5.5 |
6.4 |
-
2.08% |
0.88 |
ANTI-CANCER
DRUG DES |
77 |
91 |
58 |
42 |
34 |
709 |
10.9 |
12.8 |
8.2 |
5.9 |
4.8 |
-
1.90% |
0.81 |
The authors
Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri is Lecturer at
Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille 3, UFR IDIST
Pascal Bador is Lecturer Université
Claude Bernard, Lyon 1 Santé.
Thierry Lafouge is
Professor at Université Claude Bernard, Lyon 1 Sciences.
Hélène Prost is
Librarian at INIST-CNRS and Specialised in the Evaluation of Collections and
Document Supply.
Joachim Schöpfel is Head of the E-publishing and
Document Supply Department at INIST-CNRS and Lecturer on Scientific Information
at the
[1] Consortium
Universitaire de Périodiques Numériques, most important national consortium of French universities and research
organisations, see www.couperin.org
[2] See http://www.sudoc.abes.fr
[3] TULIP: The University Licensing Program started in
1992 and performed by Elsevier and nine universities in the
[5] See footnote 1.
[6] French national research organisation in
medical sciences.
[7] Most important French national fundamental
research organisation with 30,000 scientific and technical staff.