Relationship between electronic journal downloads and citations in library consortia

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between electronic journal downloads and citations and whether online electronic resource usage can be adopted as an alternative to citation for evaluation of scholarly discourse.

A consolidated 16 publishers’ COUNTER usage data of UGC-Infonet members was collected from INFLIBNET Centre. The usage was meticulously filtered from UGC-subscribed journals and institutional subscriptions. The quantitative data were analysed to establish the relationship between download, impact factor (IF) and price. Multiple regression analysis was used to assess the influence of price and IF on usage and to predict the usage when they are known and the threshold for significance was set at p < 0.05.

There exists a relationship between IF and downloads of journals in UGC-Infonet. Journal IF and price significantly influence usage, where journal IF plays an important role in the intensity of the use. Also, the top 25 hottest downloaded papers were journals with IF; hence, no journal without IF featured in the top 25 most downloaded journals in the consortia. The relationship between the top 25 IF journals in the consortia and download is strong (r = 0.368537).

The only account that reports on the relationship between journal IFs and downloads for UGC-Infonet consortia. Also, the influence of usage behaviour with respect to citation and price of a journal.