Use patterns of e-journals among the science community: a transaction log analysis

Rafique, Azra; Ameen, Kanwal; Arshad, Alia

doi:10.1108/el-03-2019-0073

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…SlideShare is the world’s largest repository of PowerPoint presentations on various topics [ 25 ]. An e-Journal is a periodical publication that is solely published on the Web and in a digital format [ 26 ]. A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized collection of references to published digital literature [ 27 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Student usage of open educational resources and social media at a Sri Lanka Medical School

2022

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Background The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Social Media (SM) for academic information seeking is common among undergraduates nowadays. There is limited data on OER and SM use for education in Sri Lanka. This study was aimed at evaluating the OER and SM use for education among the medical students at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya. Stratified random sampling was used to select students from the first year to the final year. A self-administrated questionnaire was used to collect data. Results The study included 257 responses (response rate: 89.5%), of which 185 (72.0%) were females. The OER and SM use for educational purposes at least once a month among students was 96.1% (95%CI: 93.7–98.5%) and 88.3% (95%CI: 84.4–92.3%) respectively. There was no gender difference in OER and SM use. The main reasons for accessing OER were the availability of information at any time (36.1%) and ease of information access (31.5%). Wiki sites (84.4%) and Facebook (79.8%) were the highest accessed OER and SM platforms. The majority of students were in view that the information on wiki sites (51.4%) and results of general non-specific web searches (56.0%) were reliable. Only 33.9% of students searched information from educational and government-related sources and 18.7% had accessed e-journals. Through SM, 79.0% joined educational groups and 77.0% followed the medical-related sites, pages and people. More than one-third of students (35.8%) could not find academic information from SM due to the information overload and 31.1% mentioned that SM distracted their education. Conclusion The majority of the students used OER and SM for education; however, only a minority accessed reliable information. Students accepted information available in wiki sites and general non-specific web searchers without considering the credibility of sources. The majority of the students did not refer to e-journals. Distractions to academic work and the difficulty to access accurate information were major concerns of using SM. This study highlights the importance of improving information literacy among medical students.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Student usage of open educational resources and social media at a Sri Lanka Medical School

2022

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“…There are 1,172 teaching faculty members and 5,392 staff members in the university (PU Fact Book, 2017). The detailed raw log data acquisition and processing E-book data mining have already been explained by Rafique et al (2019). The definition of various terms or patterns like hits, visitors, sessions with duration and page-views are defined as under:…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are 1,172 teaching faculty members and 5,392 staff members in the university (PU Fact Book, 2017). The detailed raw log data acquisition and processing have already been explained by Rafique et al (2019). The definition of various terms or patterns like hits, visitors, sessions with duration and page-views are defined as under:Hits: Hit is a single action taken by a user at a website like a click on the link that corresponds to one line of data in the web server log file.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

E-book data mining: real information behavior of university academic community

Rafique

Ameen

Arshad

2021

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PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the evidence-based use patterns of Higher Education Commission (HEC) subscribed e-books databases by the academic community at institutions of higher education in Pakistan. The study also investigates the differences in usage based on points of access, scholarly disciplines and gender of users.Design/methodology/approachA transaction log analysis (TLA) method was used to explore the use patterns of HEC e-books databases at the University of the Punjab, utilizing the SAWMILL analytical software and MS Excel.FindingsThe results of the study showed that the use of e-books was at a growing stage at the university. Male boarding students of the university were more active users of e-books as compared to their female counterparts. The Central Library of the University of the Punjab, the Department of Zoology and the Institute of Communication Studies were the most frequently used access points for the e-book users, and the Faculties of Sciences, Life Sciences, Economics and Management Sciences had the most active e-book readers. Furthermore, it was found that the HEC e-books databases were only being used during the four months of summer vacations at the university.Research limitations/implicationsThe study provides only descriptive use frequencies rather than a deep log analysis of e-books usage.Practical implicationsThis research provides important practical implications for examining the evidence-based use patterns of e-books databases' users at the higher educational level. The research suggests that HEC should maintain subscriptions of the most required e-books databases and that the information professionals should conduct orientations and information literacy programs to enhance the utilization of these subscribed databases among female boarder students and those faculties where they were being used less frequently.Originality/valueThe study is the second part of the first phase of a Ph.D. project. This is the first large scale study conducted in a developing country which reports the close to actual, approximate use patterns of e-books based on raw transaction logs of local cache servers at the higher academic level.

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“…They found that the percentage of zero hits was 40.01% due to failure of the system caused by the selection of wrong search options. Rafique et al (2019) analysed patterns of Pakistan ejournal use through transaction log analysis, the frequencies of page views, sessions and session duration. The log analysis was performed by using MS Excel.…”

Section: Use Analysis Of the Digital Librarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Use analysis of the digital library of PhD dissertations defended at the University of Novi Sad

Paskali

Ivanović

2021

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the digital library usage patterns as a means of improving the system, as well as the user experience, to give appropriate recognition to the most popular dissertations’ authors and to measure the interest of non-academic users for dissertations defended at the University of Novi Sad (UNS). Design/methodology/approach A logging module of the digital library of theses and dissertations of University of Novi Sad (PHD UNS) application has been implemented. The module recorded the messages relating to the search queries and downloads over a three-year period from 2017–2019. These logs are analysed using the Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) technology stack and the results are shown using graphs and tables. Findings The analysis determined the perfect time for weekly maintenance of the system, defined a recommendation for improving the system and revealed the most popular dissertations. A significant number of downloads and queries originated from citizens, i.e. users outside the academic community. Practical implications The conducted analysis defined recommendations for the system improvement which can be used by PHD UNS research and development (R&D) team and revealed the most popular dissertations which are used for the promotion of its authors through faculties’ websites. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of ELK based log analysis of a Serbian language documents’ repository. Besides, the value of results for the PHD UNS R&D team and UNS rector team, the study proves that PhD digital library presents an important Open Science communication channel for presenting scientific results to the citizens.

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Use patterns of e-journals among the science community: a transaction log analysis

Cited by 9 publications

References 35 publications

Student usage of open educational resources and social media at a Sri Lanka Medical School

Student usage of open educational resources and social media at a Sri Lanka Medical School

E-book data mining: real information behavior of university academic community

Use analysis of the digital library of PhD dissertations defended at the University of Novi Sad

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