Analysis of Demand and Supply of Foreign Language Journals in Agricultural Science: A Case Study of CAAS

Abstract

[Purpose/Significance] Research on the demand and supply analysis of agricultural literature resources is of great significance to the collection construction of agricultural libraries, especially under the current new situation. The demand analysis of academic resources of agricultural science has always been a difficult task for agricultural special libraries because it covers a wide range of disciplines and involves the multiple cross and integrated applications of various disciplines with agriculture science. This paper innovates the methods of demand and supply analysis based on multi-level information organization and fine-grained data analysis, which would discover both the systematic demands and accurate demands of agricultural researchers, and help to adapt to the changes of agricultural science research paradigm. [Method/Process] This study took the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) as an example, collecting its published foreign language journals and the corresponding cited references, as well as its usage data of foreign language electronic journals databases. Then this paper used the methods of citation analysis, subject organization, etc. to analyze the institutional demand characteristics that include literature language, document type, publication years, disciplines distribution, covered subjects and the utilized database of foreign-language periodical resources. The full-text supply rate of foreign-language electronic journals has been calculated to evaluate the satisfaction and the ability of supplying collection resources. The literature comprehensive utilization index has also been calculated to reflect the literature utilization capacity of CAAS's affiliated institutes by the methods of correlation analysis and multiple correlation coefficient weighting. [Results/Conclusions] The results show that the demands of foreign-language journals of CAAS involve not only classical agricultural disciplines but also some emerging and interdisciplinary fields, and there are big gaps in the level of literature supply and utilization among its affiliated institutes. The construction of literature resource supply system of CAAS should strengthen the demand analysis, enrich the subscription mode of full-text resources, and expand the non-full-text resources. As for the agricultural special libraries, the demand and supply analysis of agricultural science literature resources should follow the development trends of agricultural disciplines, taking into account the systematic and prospective demands, and carry out accurate, thematic and knowledge-based demand analysis in the relevant subject areas. Users can also be encouraged to participate in library collection construction, and diversified demand feedback channels should be provided for them. At the same time, resource construction quality and service efficiency evaluation should also be brought to the forefront.

Keywords

• agricultural science|resource construction|user demands|literature supply