Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has released the findings of its new study that explores non-journal resources. According to the study, business faculty rely on materials that share insights and ideas ahead of publication, in addition to using scholarly journals, for active research projects. The faculty members typically use working papers, printed books, pre-prints, conference proceedings and dissertations to explore specific research topics. When asked about passive forms of research, such as staying up-to-date in the field or identifying ideas for further research, newspapers join books at the top of most-used resources.
While scholarly journals are an established resource of research, greater clarity has been sought to understand how other content types are being used in the research process. The ProQuest study is seen to show that faculty members require a breadth of resources in addition to journals to meet their active research requirements in creating scholarly content.
The study was based on usage statistics in the scholarly business database ABI/INFORM and a survey of more than 100 business faculty members and graduate students in the US. The survey results found that research for active projects most frequently included exploration of working papers (85 percent), print books (85 percent), pre-publication papers (84 percent) and raw data (83 percent), followed by conference proceedings (74 percent) and abstracts (64 percent), e-books (56 percent) and dissertations or theses (55 percent). Less popular, but still important, were patents, grey literature, SWOT analysis, videos, standards, best practices reports, blogs and book reviews.
Despite the growth of e-books, print books currently have a stronger following with faculty, the study observes. For both print and e-books, respondents indicated they would use their own or professional allowance funds to purchase books without checking availability in the library. The convenience of having the item within easy reach is a factor, especially for books that are referred to frequently.
The heavy use of raw data is a growing area of spending and interest among business librarians as they explore how best to meet their researchers’ needs through acquisition, management, and curation. A ProQuest study on data use and archiving is underway, with results available later this year.
Exploration of non-journal research sources is an area of ongoing global study by ProQuest. Global trends and regional differences will be published later in 2012.
