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?