Knitting Together Qualitative and Quantitative Data About Your E-journals

Abstract

When it comes to developing collections, librarians have historically faced the dilemma of providing access to high quality resources versus those that are highly used. The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a tool that provides a series of metrics of journal quality or impact for more than 15,000 major research journals. While the validity of these metrics has been regularly debated, there are precious few other tools or metrics that are so easily accessible. This presentation covers a method using MS Access and Excel to combine JCR metrics with local usage to generate comparisons with only a modest amount of work. By the end of this session, attendees will be able to export data from JCR, clean it, match the JCR list with their list of e-journals, generate overlap rates by category, and compare external rankings with internal usage.