Impact of access to e-resources through the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium on research output of member universities

摘要

Over the last several years, the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium has been providing Indian universities with electronic access to national and international scholarly journals. These journals span wide areas of natural and physical sciences, social sciences and humanities, and address a long-standing need of the university community for access to scholarly publications. In this article, we describe some details of this programme and examine the impact it has made on research and development activity in the universities. The research output data from three citation indices, namely Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index for the first 50 universities to be made part of the programme have revealed that the number of research articles produced by these 50 universities has increased by more than 75% in past 5 years, i.e. from 2005 to 2009 in comparison to the previous block of 5 years, i.e. 2000 to 2004. While increase in research output is evident in all three major subject disciplines, i.e. science, social science and arts and humanities, increase in research output is significantly higher in science, compared to the other two disciplines. Moreover, a strong positive correlation is found between the number of articles downloaded by these 50 universities from e-resources accessible to them through the consortium and research articles published by them. We also comment on the influence of other factors such as number of researchers and levelof research funding on this correlation.