Download - Not Just Another Survey
Mark MacEachern, Anna Schnitzer, Merle Rosenzweig, Andrew
Hickner, Chrysta Meadowbrooke, Abby Bedford
University of Michigan
Not Just Another Survey
© Regents of the University of Michigan 2009-2010
• HSL provides:– Access to premier online databases– Instruction in research skills– SFX links to full text in 15,000+ e-
journals– Help to keep current with the literature
• But what resources and tools do our patrons know about and use?
• To determine:– How much awareness patrons have of
various resources HSL makes available– Whether patrons are using them to the
fullest
• To discover where to focus efforts for:– Education (e.g., classes, tutorials)– Marketing (e.g., website, Facebook)
• Anonymous self-reports using SurveyMonkey online
• Prize drawing as incentive• 11 questions• Link posted on HSL home page, July 3–Aug.
3, 2009• Promoted by liaisons to depts.
331 responses
MEDLINE Access • 51% of respondents
use PubMed• 32% use both
PubMed and OvidSP• 11% use just OvidSP• NCBI/Entrez most
common alternative to PubMed/OvidSP
Other DatabasesISI: > 40% of users didn’t use any ISI resources.
MEDLINE = most common use.CSA: > 80% did not use.EBSCO: 63% did not use. CINAHL (29%) and
PsycINFO (17.2%) most commonly used.
Regularly Used Databases • NCBI/BLAST, Google Scholar, Cochrane most
common
Google: Only 17.7% used Google Scholar with full-text linking provided by HSL’s MGet It function.
Impact factor: 55% don’t know how to find one.
H-index: 90% don’t know what it is.
Keeping Current • 55% use email alerts.• 41% use table of contents alerts.• 15% use RSS feeds.• 36% use other methods or do not keep
current at all.
Keeping Current
Image courtesy of the Wordle.net web application, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
• PubMed or combination of PubMed and OvidSP preferred over just OvidSP
• MEDLINE, ISI were most widely used – But people did not know how to use the most
signature ISI features (h-index, impact factor) • CINAHL strongly used, but other EBSCO resources
not• Lack of knowledge about using full-text linking
with Google Scholar
• User misunderstanding of questions• Who is using what?• Why a resource is being used or not• Caution required in
interpreting/extracting hypotheses/implications of data
Possible Applications of Findings
• Instructional
• Collection development
• Reference
Directions for Further Study• Zero in on specific resources:
– Commonly used vs. little used resources• Analyze populations: grad, faculty, undergrad• Staying current: WHY do they use email versus
Table of Contents or RSS?