User Preference Research Of Chinese Scholarly Articles From The Perspective Of Usage Metrics

With the rapid development of information technology and Internet,academic journals have undergone a major change from printed format to electronic format.Electronic journals have been accepted and used by more and more users,who begin to use the Internet to browse article information and download full text of articles,and the usage data recorded in this process has attracted the attention of researchers in the field of scientometrics.This study selected eight disciplines of 53 journals included in CSSCI or CSCD,collected different usage data of papers published in 2014-2017 on the payfor-access platforms(CNKI)and journal official sites,and explored user preferences of Chinese academic papers from the perspective of usage metrics.Firstly,it proved that there were differences in user platform preferences between journal official sites and pay-for-access platforms.Users tended to use journal official sites rather than pay-for-access platforms to obtain papers,and users in social sciences are more likely to use CNKI platform to obtain required papers than users in natural sciences.Moreover,academic papers published in journals with higher impact factors tend to get more downloads.Compared with CNKI,downloads of articles on journal official sites are more discretely distributed.The paper citations,downloads of CNKI and journal official sites all polarized distributed,and paper downloads of journal official sites showed the most obvious Matthew effect.The paper citations of CNKI shows a strong positive correlation with the paper downloads of CNKI,while the correlation between CNKI citations and downloads of journal official sites was not clear.The paper downloads of journal official sites showed a lower correlation with pay-foraccess platforms overall.Secondly,it proved that there were differences in user interest preferences between journal official sites and pay-for-access platforms.From the perspective of Jaccard similarity coefficient between the top 20% most downloaded papers in journal official sites and pay-for-access platforms,it is found that there were significant differences of user interest preferences between different platforms.Also,it revealed that there were no significant differences in author number,author titles and author academic influences between two platforms.It is worth noting that when downloading the required papers,users are affected by background of author.The academic papers whose first author is a professor got more downloads,and papers with higher author influence got more downloads.In perspective of article topics,users of different platforms pay attention to different topics.The research topics of CNKI platform users were relatively concentrated,while the research topics of the journal official site users were relatively balanced.The CNKI platform users paid the highest attention to empirical research papers,and the journal official site users paid the highest attention to opinion articles.Most journal users paid more attention to academic papers with shorter titles and fewer keywords,and users of both platforms preferred academic papers with more diverse vocabularies.