I attended the International STM Association annual conference last week. Carol Tenopir gave an excellent talk on her latest research on how people choose what articles to read. What struck me as really interesting was the difference in characteristics between researcher behavior as reader and as author. As authors researchers are looking for the highest ranked journal for their article where it can be read by their peers. CIBER at UCL have published a number of interesting studies on this topic. However, Carol presented the seven possible reasons for choosing an article to read in the following order:
- Relevance of topic
- Accessibility (free to me, online)
- Source of the article (refereed journal)
- Journal brand (whether the title is highly regarded)
- Name of author (whether known to the reader)
- Type of publisher
- Author’s institution
What was even more interesting perhaps were the “additional characteristics” volunteered by the survey respondents, namely readability/design and editing quality. It is good to know that production values continue to be valued by our readers.
There will no doubt be a lot more interesting data in Carol’s final publication on this research so we will be looking out for that.
SAGE Connection 