Research

Research Journal Use by Faculty in the School of Dentistry: A Preliminary Study

Background:

The School of Dentistry includes both a strong clinical component and a strong research component. While the clinical faculty are frequently overheard telling potential faculty and students that this is the strongest library to which they have ever had access, the same is not true for the research faculty of the School. Based on concerns expressed by the research faculty, a research project was designed to evaluate the actual journal use of the research faculty, and the ability of the Dentistry Library to support their information needs.

Methodology:

A Medline search identified 120 articles published in 1998 by the 41 faculty of the School with funded research grants. Webofscience was used to find the bibliographies for 30 of these articles. Duplicate citations were deleted, leaving 3347 unique citations. Non-periodical titles were also removed, leaving 2553 articles cited in 644 journals. The 644 journals were searched to determine their distribution among the University of Michigan Libraries.

Analysis:

According to the results from this sample, the Dentistry Library owned only 17% of the journals cited by the research faculty of the School of Dentistry. There were an additional 4% of the journal titles for which the Dentistry Library used to have subscriptions, but which were cancelled at some point. According to MIRLYN, electronic access is available for 26% of the titles. There is some overlap between these two groups, but if there were not, access to both the Dentistry Library and electronic journals would still give access to only 43% of the titles needed, compared with 53% available at the Taubman Medical Library. The Shapiro Science Library also provided more of the needed journals than Dentistry, with 25% of the needed titles. Evidently, the research faculty are quite correct in their perception that the Dentistry Library alone does not meet their research information needs.

Out of the 644 journal titles, over half of the total citations came from only 53 journals. Of these 53 most-cited titles, most were available. Only 7 of the 53 titles were not owned by the Dentistry Library and not available electronically as of July 20, 1999.

This would seem to indicate, that while the Dentistry Library cannot compass the breadth of all topics touching on the field of dentistry, it does meet the primary needs of its users. It does this by having the most needed journals and books, and relying on the other University Libraries for additional resources.

Conclusion:

To support new trends in the field of dentistry (such as recombinant DNA therapies for wound healing) and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research in the life sciences, it would be highly desirable to negotiate electronic access for the library system as a whole for these titles. If electronic access is not available, or has restrictions which do not meet the guidelines and criteria established by the University Library system, it would be desirable for the Dentistry Library to subscribe to print copies of the top journals cited by the research faculty of the School of Dentistry. It is estimated that $3,813 in funds would be needed for this purpose.