Greetings, journal pickers!

Okay, okay. That’s a really poor title, but I’ve been playing around with trying to establish our most popular electronic journals this afternoon and stuck in my head as I’ve been working on this has been “Dah dah dah, dah dah daaah, da – da – daaaaaaah”, hence the frankly appalling attempt to link chart shows on the radio with electronic journal usage. It’s warm in here and I’m tired: forgive me! There’s a serious point to this, however. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been delivering sessions to colleagues in the university on electronic resources matters and how to manage them, and one thing I’ve discussed is the price of our most expensive journal. One thing I didn’t think to discuss, and it can be just as thought-provoking, was the actual ‘popularity’ of our electronic journals. Of course, statistics are largely what you make of them, and I’ve talked before about analysing the statistics of electronic journal usage, but I did start to wonder if we can establish our “Top 10”, or even “Top 20” and what that might tell us about the way in which our journals are used, and where we might look to expand our collection in future.

As a UK HEI, we’re very lucky that we have access to something called JUSP (Journal Usage Statistics Portal) that gathers statistics from many of our electronic journal providers. It’s made my job so much easier lately and also provides us with a Top 5 from each of our journal providers. The results are often surprising (if you’re a librarian, especially if you’re an electronic resources librarian like me, which I accept many of you are not…) and at times present a bit of mysterious picture in terms of our electronic journal usage. So, this afternoon, I’ve compiled Top 5s from each of our electronic journals provider from JUSP* and I present to you the University of Bolton Library’s Top 20 electronic journals for August 2012 to the end of June 2013 (pretty much our academic year):

Drum roll…..

20. Journal of Education Policy

19. International Journal of Human Resource Management

18. Early Years

17. Journal of Management

16. Journal of Sports Sciences

15. American Journal of Sports Medicine

14. British Journal of Social Psychology

13. Construction Management and Economics

12. Nurse Education Today

11. Journal of Science and Medicine and Sport

And now the Top 10…

10. European Journal of Marketing

9. International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management

8. International Journal of Project Management

7. Personality and Individual Differences

6. International Journal od Operations and Production Management

5. Supply Chain Management

4. Management Decision

3. Journal of Advanced Nursing

2. Polymer Degradation and Stability

1. Plant and Cell Physiology

*JUSP doesn’t provide us with statistics for all of our journals.

What do you reckon? Are any of your favourites in this list? I think this list can tell us rather a lot, and it would be interesting to repeat this exercise this time next year, just to see if anything’s changed.