The impact of Internet-based electronic resources on formal scholarly communication in the area of library and information science: a citation analysis

The Internet-based electronic resources (e-sources) are growing dramatically; however, there have not been empirical studies evaluating the impact of e-sources, as a whole, on formal scholarly communication. This study tries to investigate how much e-sources have been used in formal scholarly communication, using a case study in the area of library and information science (LIS) during the period 1994 to 1996. Four citation-based indicators are proposed and used in this study for the impact measurement. Compared with the impact of print sources, the impact of e-sources on formal scholarly communication in LIS is small, as measured by e-sources cited, and does not increase significantly by year even though there is observable growth of the impact across the years. It is found that journal format is related to the rate of citing e-sources, i.e. electronic journal (e-journal) articles are more likely to cite e-sources than are print journal (p-journal) articles. However, once authors cite e-sources, there is no significant difference in the number of e-references per article by journal format or by year. This finding suggests that, at this stage, citing e-sources may depend on authors rather than the journal format in which the authors choose to publish.