Nancy Kaplan CS 755/845 - Introduction to Digital Libraries Project Proposal 2/19/98 "Determining the Publication Impact from a Digital Library" Overview My project will compare access and retrieval metrics for reports available from the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) and the NASA Center for Aerospace Information (CASI) document delivery service. The NTRS is a digital library which provides full text NASA reports and other publications from NASA authors. NASA CASI distributes hard copies of NASA reports on a cost recovery basis. The objective in comparing these two entities is to see if the different distribution methods impact the usage of NASA reports. I will use citation analysis to help determine which reports are highly used. Ultimately, I hope to draw some useful conclusions about the usage of the NTRS digital library. Methodology Using NTRS access logs, I will obtain statistics for the top 25 documents requested from the NTRS within a given time frame (probably one calendar year). I will then obtain from CASI personnel statistics for their top 25 requested documents in the same time period. After I have compiled the list of reports from NTRS and CASI (which may number less than 50 total if there is overlap), I will conduct a formal citation analysis of these using Science Citation Index. My conclusions will be based on the results of the citation analysis. Other comments I am not completely certain what I will find out in this research, but I will be looking closely at several factors and how they relate. For example, I may be able to identify some parallels between the number of times a report is accessed and the number of citations it receives. I think retrieval analysis of the NASA reports will show an entirely different view of impact than citation analysis. To determine this, I will need to look at the reports available from both sources (CASI and NTRS) and see if the increased availability has any apparent impact on the number of citations. There will also be some limitations that will guide my work. For example, I must take into account the narrow scope of traditional citation indexes as I draw my conclusions. Bibliography: Garfield, Eugene. _Citation Indexing --- Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities_. New York: Wiley, c1979. Harter, Stephen P. and Kik, Hak Joon. "Electronic Journals and Scholarly Communication: A Citation and Reference Study". _The Journal of Electronic Publishing_ 3(2), December 1997. Harter, Stephen P. "The Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication: A Citation Analysis". _The Public-Access Computer Systems Review_ 7(5), 1996. Larson, Ray R. "Bibliometrics of the World Wide Web: An Exploratory Analysis of the Intellectual Structure of Cyberspace". In: Hardin, Steve (Ed.), _Global Complexity: Information, Chaos, and Control -- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science_. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today, Inc., 1996, p.71-8.