How readers discover content in scholarly publications

摘要

Scholarly journal publishers have concerned themselves for many years with their delivery platforms and their feature sets, but have spent rather less time on considering how their content will be discovered. Traditionally there has been an overreliance on major search engines and leading professional indexes. For the past ten years we have continually surveyed and studied the landscape of journal article discovery, culminating in a large scale survey (n = 40,443) of journal readers in October to December 2015. The survey has revealed important trends in discovery: a reducing reliance on professional search, some increases in the importance of library-intermediated discovery, the continued emergence of professional and social networking sites,and a shift in importance from Google to Google Scholar. In addition, the survey has revealed some important perceptions about the abundance of free versus paid downloads which may influence library budgets in the future.