Correlation analysis between university research competitiveness and library’s scholarly information in OECD nations and Korea

Abstract

Beginning from the premise that research competitiveness at the university level is the starting point for national competitiveness as a whole, this paper analyzes the correlation between university research-related performance and the scholarly or academic resources available through a country’s library system. An analysis of this correlation from two different angles — a macroscopic approach considering universities in OECD nations and a microscopic approach focusing only upon universities in Korea — found that there is indeed a significant correlation between university research performance and the scholarly information available at libraries. A regression analysis of the two approaches also found that the more journal titles subscribed to by university libraries and the higher their budget for materials, the greater the contribution university libraries make to university research competitiveness in Korea as well as other OECD countries. In this light, in order for Korea to reach a level of research competitiveness comparable to other OECD members, policies need to be created that will effectively increase the number of journals subscribed to by university libraries.