A Service Support for Selection of E-Journal Subscription: An Evidence-Based Practice

Abstract

The selection of an e-journal title is one of the challenging tasks for librarians in the process of collection development. As libraries receive a limited budget, librarians need to be careful and carry out thorough analysis based on the evidence-based approaches in selecting which e-journal to be subscribed. One of the different ways to analyse user demand for e-journals is to analyse access denied reports or known as turn-away reports from publishers. This study reports on how a support service was developed to select a new e-journal subscription for the National University of Malaysia (UKM) Library based on the COUNTER Journal Report (JR2). From this report, the number of access denied to full-text articles from four main commercial online databases; Science Direct, Springer Nature, Wiley Online Library, and Taylor & Francis were analysed. The Pareto Principle method was used to analyse e-journal titles that received high demand from library users. Profiling the journal's coverage in Scopus, Web of Science (WoS), and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) as well as mapping their subject and publisher's price was carried out. The results showed that from a total of 7,474 e-journal titles, 1,495 (20%) e-journal titles that received 132,008 (68%) number of access denied were selected for further analysis. This evidence service can help the Journal Unit, UKM Library in a selection of new e-journal titles based on library users' needs and assist the library management to make better decisions for e-journal subscriptions.