lascar.p65 422 College & Research Libraries September 2001 An Analysis of Journal Use by Structural Biologists with Applications for Journal Collection Development Decisions Claudia Lascar and Loren D. Mendelsohn This paper defines and examines structural biology as a subdiscipline of molecular biology. Using bibliometric methodologies, it analyzes the publication and citation patterns of a sample group of structural biolo­ gists from multiple institutions. The citations analyzed covered a very large subject range, demonstrating the multidisciplinary nature of this subfield. The results were consistent with several models for journal selection. These models were used to compile a short list of specialized titles supporting structural biology. Although the research was performed on a relatively small group of local researchers, it has broader applica­ tions for other institutions attempting to develop similar collections. n December 1998, several re­ search institutions in New York State formed a consor­ tium to promote research in protein and nucleic acid structure.1 The City College, one of the senior colleges of the CUNY system, was chosen to be the site for the consortium’s magnetic reso­ nance research laboratory. This facility was to be designated the Center for Struc­ tural Biology (hereinafter referred to as “the Center”). In early 1999, the City Col­ lege Library was asked to develop a plan for the support of the scientists, drawn from all of the participating institutions, who would be using this new facility. Thus, the authors needed to identify key library resources, both print and online, that had the following characteristics: • They had to be useful to those who would be using the Center ’s research fa­ cilities. • They had to be familiar to these same scientists (i.e., at least some of the resources had to be materials that the sci­ entists were already using at their home institutions). For the purposes of the plan, these re­ sources were limited to two categories: print and online research journals (the focus of this paper), and online indexing and abstracting services. Thus, this re­ search is focused on determining an ap­ propriate model based on bibliometric methodologies for accurately identifying such resources. What Is Structural Biology? The first part of the task was a matter of definition: A working definition of struc­ tural biology had to be established. To do this, the authors examined its development as a subdiscipline of molecular biology and the related discipline of biochemistry. Claudia Lascar is Science Reference Librarian and Loren D. Mendelsohn is Chief of the Science/Engineer­ ing Library at the City College of New York; e-mail: clascar@ccny.cuny.edu and lmend@ccny.cuny.edu, respectively. 422 mailto:lmend@ccny.cuny.edu mailto:clascar@ccny.cuny.edu An Analysis of Journal Use by Structural Biologists 423 Molecular biology and biochemistry both attempt to understand the physico­ chemical basis of life, but from different perspectives. Traditionally, biochemistry has sought to understand the nature of chemical reactions within the cell and is concerned primarily with transformation of small molecules (twenty to thirty at­ oms) in living systems and the transfor­ mation of energy within living systems. Although biochemistry has some concern for large molecules (macromolecules) and One of the main advantages of NMR methods is that they do not require crystals; they are performed on solutions. their structure, such concern is limited to the role they play in the chemistry of the smaller molecules. Biochemists tend to use classical methods of chemistry to carry out their investigations. Molecular biology, on the other hand, is concerned with the interrelationships between the structure and function of the macromol­ ecules in living systems (i.e., proteins, polysaccharides and nucleic acids). Mo­ lecular biology was an outgrowth of bio­ chemistry, virology, genetics, and cell bi­ ology; in its beginnings, it relied heavily on X-ray crystallography and quantum mechanical studies. John C. Kendrew gave an excellent summary definition of molecular biology and how it differs from biochemistry: What is characteristic, however, and what may perhaps serve to differ­ entiate it from biochemistry, is the emphasis and reliance in molecular biology on concepts derived from, and only derivable from, a knowl­ edge of complex three-dimensional structures.2 Kendrew further argued that molecu­ lar biology could be broken into two sub­ disciplines, each of which developed in relative isolation from the other. He called one discipline the informational school, which was concerned with the storage and expression of genetic information in nucleic acids. Key events in the advance­ ment of this school were the breakthrough discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of the double-stranded helical struc­ ture of DNA in 1953 and the determina­ tion of the genetic code by Marshall Nirenberg and Severo Ochoa in the early 1960s. The entire field of genetic engineer­ ing is based on this school, whose great­ est achievement to date has been the map­ ping of the human genome, which was accomplished in 2000. Kendrew called the second discipline the conformational school, which was concerned primarily with the relationship between molecular structure and function in the living cell. This discipline became known as struc­ tural molecular biology or, simply, struc­ tural biology. The ultimate goal of struc­ tural biology is to determine how to pre­ dict protein structures and functions from the information stored on nucleic acids. Structural biology pursues this goal by establishing correlations between the lev­ els of structural organization of biologi­ cal macromolecules (primarily proteins and nucleic acids). Christopher M. Smith wrote a useful discussion of how this pro­ cedure has been applied to proteins in recent years.3 The first level of organiza­ tion is the primary structure. Biological macromolecules are polymers: long chains of small molecules (monomers) bonded together. The primary structure is the order in which the monomers are strung together—the amino acid (or pep- tide) sequence for proteins and the nucle­ otide sequence for nucleic acids. Second­ ary structure refers to the folding or coil­ ing of the original polymer chains by the means of hydrogen bonds (the double helix in the case of DNA or the alpha he­ lix and beta sheet in the case of polypep­ tide chains of proteins). The tertiary struc­ ture refers to how these secondary struc­ tures fold upon themselves to form larger structural units, such as the supercoiling for DNA or the arrangement of the alpha helix and beta sheet regions for polypep­ tides. Some proteins have a quaternary 424 College & Research Libraries September 2001 structure, in which a number of polypep­ tide chains, each having its own tertiary structure, aggregate to form one large molecule. The structure of nucleic acids is rela­ tively simple in comparison with the structures of proteins. Nucleic acids are made up of linear sugar-phosphate back­ bones with regular repeating structures of only four monomers. The variations in sequence can be enormous, but the struc­ tures remain relatively similar because the monomers are chemically similar. In the case of DNA, two of these linear mol­ ecules are joined together to form the double-helix structure elucidated by Watson and Crick. This simpler structure is in keeping with the more limited func­ tion of nucleic acids, which (with a very few exceptions) serve only to store and transfer information. By contrast, proteins have very complicated structures. They are composed of long linear polypeptide chains. The monomers that make up these chains are twenty very diverse amino ac­ ids. The chemical diversity of these amino acid monomers results in an enormous diversity of structure and an equally huge diversity of function. This diversity of structure is necessitated by the role that proteins play, catalyzing virtually all of the chemical functions of life and serving many structural and mechanical func­ tions as well. Beginnings of Structural Biology Structural biology emerged in the late 1930s when it became possible to deter­ mine the tertiary and quaternary struc­ ture of biological macromolecules. Scien­ tists accomplished this through the use of X-ray crystallography, which enabled them to calculate with great accuracy the precise location of groups of atoms within the crystal. Initially, such determinations were a difficult and time-consuming pro­ cess, simply because of the newness of the technique and the lack of a thorough un­ derstanding of the geometry of the chemi­ cal bonds that formed the structures. Also, there were difficulties in preparing crys­ tals of macromolecules that were large enough to use with this technique. The work of Linus Pauling on bond angles and atomic distances in the late 1940s con­ siderably simplified the entire process, but the process still remained quite diffi­ cult. The first correlation of structure with function was achieved by David C. Phillips in 1965, when he determined the structure of lysozyme (an antibacterial enzyme present in egg white and many human secretions) and proposed a mechanism based on that structure. Philips published a useful summary of his The majority of structural biology journal titles were distributed among two categories: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Biophys­ ics. work in 1966.4 By 1970, only eleven struc­ tures had been solved.5 Over the years, improvements in instrumentation, crys­ tallization techniques, and methods of data processing have considerably expe­ dited the determination of such struc­ tures. Instrumentation improved as a re­ sult of the development of more intense X-ray sources, such as synchrotron radia­ tion. Crystallization became considerably simpler with the application of recombi­ nant DNA techniques, which greatly sim­ plified the process of obtaining large ho­ mogeneous protein samples. With more intense X-ray sources and larger crystals, researchers were able to increase the reso­ lution of the technique, enabling them to determine with relative precision the lo­ cation even of individual atoms. The com­ puterization of data processing, as well as the establishment of increasingly large structure libraries for purposes of com­ parison, greatly expedited the derivation of structures from the X-ray data. More­ over, as techniques of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometry have been expanded and refined, researchers have been able to apply such methodologies to macromolecular structure determination. One of the main advantages of NMR methods is that they do not require crys­ tals; they are performed on solutions. An Analysis of Journal Use by Structural Biologists 425 Their disadvantage is that NMR data are most useful only for relatively small pro­ teins. In cases where NMR and crystallo­ graphic techniques can be used together, investigators can determine macromo­ lecular structures with great accuracy and high resolution. Use of Citation Data The nature of the authors’ user group (composed mostly of researchers from institutions other than City College) was such that journal use data were extremely difficult to obtain. The user group was unresponsive to both telephone and e- mail requests for use data, and the authors did not have access to the interlibrary loan statistics. The best data that could be ob­ tained were anecdotal, based on a few face-to-face discussions with some of the scientists and interviews with the librar­ ians at their home institutions. The inter­ views gave a sense of what sources the researchers used most frequently but yielded no hard data. The authors also examined their library collections and electronic resources to determine those materials to which the researchers were accustomed to have access. Because of the lack of hard use data, the authors decided to use citation and publication patterns as their primary means of quantifying the importance of structural biology journals. Finally, because of the focus of the planned facility on NMR techniques, the authors determined to give greater weight to journals covering that topic. Such bibliometric analysis was dis­ cussed at length by Howard D. White and Katherine W. McCain and has been used as a tool for evaluating journal collections for more than seventy years.6 There have been several applications of this technique to the management of science journal col­ lections in the past few years.7–9 One of the more important tools in performing these analyses is Journal Citation Reports (JCR), an annual that has been published since 1976 as an adjunct to the ISI Citation In­ dexes. JCR ranks each listed journal ac­ cording to its impact factor, a ratio “calcu­ lated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years.”10 Obviously, some preselection must take place because the cited refer­ ences are not drawn from all journals, but only from those deemed relevant by ISI. Nevertheless, the JCR impact factor is an excellent indicator of the relative impor­ tance of one journal among others in a given year, especially with respect to those in the same or similar fields. Furthermore, M.B.M. Campbell has shown that the per­ centage of use by a department correlates well with percentage of total citation by a department.11 Elizabeth Pan also indicated that there is a statistically significant cor­ relation between the ranking of biomedi­ cal journals and use count.12 She demon­ strated that in most cases, high citation count indicated high use and low citation indicated low use. For these reasons, the authors’ initial efforts at identifying impor­ tant structural biology journals focused on the use of JCR categories. When the au­ thors examined those categories that ap­ peared to be relevant, however, they real­ ized that the information the categories contained was not immediately useful. The majority of structural biology journal titles were distributed among two categories: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Biophysics. Although some of the titles were very highly ranked within these cat­ egories, it was impossible to determine their relevance to structural biology with­ out further evaluation. Thus, the authors decided to examine the citation and pub­ lication patterns of a specific group of sci­ entists drawn from the researchers who would be members of the Center, thus en­ abling the authors to calculate more fo­ cused and relevant impact factors for the journals under examination. In taking this approach, the authors fol­ lowed the pattern of the vast majority of citation studies that have been done in the sciences, nearly all of which have used fac­ ulty publications as the source of data. This has been the case regardless of the scien­ tific discipline, whether it fell within the physical sciences (e.g., Amy Dykeman’s 1994 study) or the biological sciences (e.g., http:count.12 http:department.11 426 College & Research Libraries the studies on the literature of molecular biology by Julie M. Hurd, Deborah D. Blecic, and Rama Vishwanatham and by Janet Hughes).13–15 This study is the first application of this technique to structural biology. Such a study is needed for the fol­ lowing reasons: • Structural biology is a distinct sub- field of molecular biology that uses spe­ cific biophysical techniques such as X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy to determine the three-dimensional struc­ ture and function of macromolecules. • It is a multidisciplinary field. • It developed independently and had a slower beginning in comparison with the rest of molecular biology. • Structural biology has experienced tremendous growth and development in the past decade with concomitant growth of its literature, as demonstrated by the emergence of new journal titles dedicated to the field: Nature Structural Biology (in 1994), Structure (in 1993), Folding and De­ sign (in 1996) (the latter two titles merged in 1999 to form Structure with Folding and Design), Journal of Biomolecular Structure (in 1996), Journal of Biomolecular NMR (in 1991), Journal of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics (in 1997), Macromo­ lecular Structures (in 1991), Journal of Mo­ lecular Modeling (in 1997), and others. Moreover, the proportion of structural biology articles in the older and more es­ tablished journal titles has been steadily increasing. • As a discipline, it has direct appli­ cations for the pharmaceutical and bio­ technology industries. • As a discipline, it has direct rel­ evance to the whole of science. • Research institutions are establish­ ing structural biology departments and programs that require support from their libraries. Methodology and Data Collection The first step was to create a set of source items from which references would be taken. Using information from the Center ’s promotional brochure, eleven key researchers were identified. To this September 2001 number, one participating scientist was added from the authors’ own institution. A search in Web of Science (ISI’s Web-based version of Science Citation Index) was con­ ducted to form a list of these researchers’ publications from 1995 to 1999. The au­ thors used any articles that had refer­ ences, which included reviews and some letters, but excluded meeting abstracts and editorial materials. In this way, a list of 218 articles was compiled with a me­ dian of thirteen articles per author. Two of the authors were disqualified as outli­ ers because one had produced sixty-eight articles and the other only two during the time period examined. The remaining sample contained 146 articles, represent­ ing the work of nine researchers (table 1). The journals in which these articles ap­ peared are listed in table 2 by frequency. To ensure equal representation within this group, the authors used a maximum of thirteen articles per author (the median) for the analysis. If a researcher had pro­ duced more articles, the authors ran­ domly selected thirteen of them for analy­ sis. This process yielded a total of 106 articles containing 4,283 cited references. Table 3 displays a ranking of these refer­ ences by type of literature. Finally, when calculating the impact factors, the authors divided the total number of citations by the total number of articles per journal, rather than using Garfield’s more rigor­ ous method described above. This was necessary because of the small size of the study sample. Data Analysis Using this data set, it was determined that the average number of cited refer­ ences per article was 40.45 (table 1). It should be noted that most of the origi­ nal research articles had a high number of references, which provided a consid­ erable quantity of data, thus partially offsetting the small number of authors in the sample. Of the cited references, 95.1 percent were to journal articles (table 3). This high proportion is consistent with established theory that the major­ ity of scholarly communication in the sci­ An Analysis of Journal Use by Structural Biologists 427 TABLE 1 Researchers and Their Publications Average Name Affiliation Articles Articles Total Ref. per Produced Used Cites Article Ann McDermott Columbia University 13 13 505 38.85 John Cavanagh Wadsworth Center 17 13 549 42.23 Ruth Stark CUNY 17 13 425 32.69 Ming-Ming Zhou Mount Sinai School of Medicine 11 11 382 34.73 David Cowburn Rockefeller University 29 13 568 43.69 Milton Werner Rockefeller University 12 12 530 44.17 Mark Girvin Albert Einstein School of Medicine 12 12 439 36.58 Maria Tasayco CUNY 6 6 244 40.67 John Kuriyan Rockefeller University 29 13 641 49.31 Total 146 106 4,283 40.45 entific community takes place in the jour­ nals. It also should be noted that this group of 4,073 cited references repre­ sented 386 different journal titles. Table 4 ranks journals according to the fre­ quency with which they were cited in the 106 selected articles within the user group. The authors chose only those titles that were cited more than five times. This was because of fair-use con­ siderations under copyright law and their implications for library collections. Using this standard, a total of fifty-eight journals was selected. Table 4 shows that, as a rule, the authors in the study tended to cite articles appearing in the better-es­ tablished journals with greater frequency than those appearing in the newer struc­ tural biology titles. Nevertheless, some of the newer titles were cited with a sur­ prisingly high frequency, most notably Nature Structural Biology and Journal of Biomolecular NMR, which were among the top ten. Moreover, when the data in tables 2 and 4 are compared, close simi­ larities can be observed between the ci­ tation and publication patterns of the user group. Again, articles were pub­ lished most frequently in the better-es­ tablished journals, yet the two newer titles of Journal of Biomolecular NMR and Structure with Folding and Design were among the top ten. These patterns are consistent with S.M. Dhawan’s model, proposed twenty years ago and widely accepted today.16 This journal selection model proposes a tech­ nique based on permutations on whether a journal is cited, abstracted, or used and establishes five categories of journals in decreasing order of usefulness: 1. journals that are cited, abstracted, and used; 2. journals that are abstracted, used, but not cited; 3. journals that are cited, used, but not abstracted; 4. journals that are used, but neither abstracted nor cited; 5. journals that are abstracted, cited, but not used.17 As stated above, what use data the authors had was anecdotal (i.e., consisted primarily of the observations of librarians at the home institutions of the scientists in the user group). Nevertheless, when these data are viewed in light of Pan’s finding that the number of papers pub­ lished in a particular journal is a strong indicator of use, together with Hughes’s argument that the place of publication also is a strong identifier of journal im­ portance and usefulness, they indicate that the most cited journals listed in table 4 correspond to the first of Dhawan’s cat­ egories.17, 18 This list is analogous to the http:egories.17 http:today.16 428 College & Research Libraries September 2001 TABLE 2 Journals in Which Researchers' Articles Appeared Journal Name (Date of Inception) Rank Number of Articles Biochemistry (1962) 1 17 Cell (1974) 2 13 Journal of the American Chemical Society (1879) 3 9 Journal of Biomolecular NMR (1991) 4 8 Nature (1869) 4 8 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (1914) 4 8 Journal of Biological Chemistry (1905) 5 7 Structure (1993-1998) 6 6 Science (1880) 6 6 EMBO Journal (1982) 6 6 Nature Structural Biology (1994) 7 5 Journal of Molecular Biology (1959) 7 5 Biophysical Journal (1960) 8 4 Molecular and Cellular Biology (1981) 9 3 Journal of Physical Chemistry (1896) 9 3 Proteins: Structure, Function and Genetics (1987) 9 3 Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure (1972) 10 2 Current Opinion in Structural Biology (1991) 10 2 Methods in Molecular Biology (1984) 10 2 Molecular Pharmacology (1965) 10 2 Phytochemistry (1961) 10 2 Solid State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1992) 10 2 Journal of Magnetic Resonance (1969) 10 2 Trends in Biochemical Sciences (1976) 10 2 Acta Physiologica Scandinavica (1940) 11 1 Chemistry and Biology (1994) 11 1 Chemistry and Physics of Lipids (1967) 11 1 Glycobiology (1990) 11 1 FEBS Letters (1968) 11 1 Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry (1996) 11 1 Macromolecules (1968) 11 1 Magnetic Resonance in Chemistry (1985) 11 1 Molecular Cell (1997) 11 1 Oncogene (1987) 11 1 Plant Physiology (1926) 11 1 Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (1963) 11 1 Protein Engineering (1986) 11 1 Protein Science (1992) 11 1 Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters (1991) 11 1 Bioorganic Chemistry (1971) 11 1 Biochemical Society Transactions (1973) 11 1 Letters in Peptide Science (1994) 11 1 Folding & Design (1996-1998) 11 1 An Analysis of Journal Use by Structural Biologists 429 TABLE 3 Ranking by Type of Literature Type of Materials Number of Cites Percent of Citations Journals Monographs In press Theses Unpublished reports Total 4,073 175 15 10 10 4,283 95.10% 4.09% 0.35% 0.23% 0.23% 100.00% core journal collection and includes titles such as Science, Nature, Biochemistry, Pro­ ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Molecular Biology, Journal of Bio­ logical Chemistry, and EMBO Journal, which are likely to be owned by any re­ spectable academic library. These journals are well established, have a high reputa­ tion, are multidisciplinary, and reach a large audience of researchers. An argu­ ment could be made against the reliabil­ ity of using place of publication as an in­ dicator of use; for example, individuals just getting started in their research ca­ reer may publish in second-tier journals, titles they may never read. The user group for this study, however, was composed almost entirely of well-established re­ searchers who were highly unlikely to publish in such journals. Moreover, as already mentioned, the journals where they have published their recent work correspond closely with those they cite, indicating a close match in relative use­ fulness. Eight of the top ten places of pub­ lication as listed in table 2 are among the top ten journals cited. The following jour­ nals are ranked in table 4 among the top twenty-five: Nature Structural Biology, Journal of Biomolecular NMR, Proteins, Jour­ nal of Magnetic Resonance, Current Opin­ ion in Structural Biology, and Structure with Folding and Design. Nearly all of these titles also appear among the top twenty- five places of publication in table 2. Journal of Magnetic Resonance has been included, which is not specifically a struc­ tural biology journal, for two reasons. First, it is one of top-tier titles within the user group for both place of publication and citation. Second, as previously men­ tioned, greater weight has been given to journals covering NMR because that is the focus of the Center. These titles are listed in table 5, together with their impact fac­ tors as listed in the 1997 edition of JCR and as calculated for the study’s user group. Although these titles are more spe­ cialized and thus have a narrower audi­ ence than the core journals, they are clearly of great importance to the user group and also fall into Dhawan’s first category. For this reason, the authors can make valid collection development deci­ sions with regard to structural biology journals based on the data contained in tables 2 and 4. Conclusion There are limitations to this study of jour­ nal citation data. Other variables affect the citation of articles, such as the importance the individual researchers in the field and the availability of journals to different re­ searchers at different institutions. More­ over, two types of literature that can be very important tend not to be very well cited: the review literature and science news articles. In addition, the authors did not examine other titles of importance to structural biology, such as Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics or Journal of Structural Biology, because they were not cited by the authors in their sample. This does not mean that these additional journals are not important to the field of structural biology, but only that the user group did not use them dur­ ing the time period examined. Of these titles, one is new enough (first issue pub­ 430 College & Research Libraries September 2001 TABLE 4 Ranking of Journals According to Frequency Cited Journal Name (Date of Inception) Rank Number of Articles Biochemistry (1962) 1 357 Journal of Biological Chemistry (1905) 2 353 Nature (1869) 3 290 Cell (1974) 4 233 Journal of the American Chemical Society (1879) 5 226 Science (1880) 6 216 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (1914) 7 211 Journal of Magnetic Resonance ( 1969) 8 166 EMBO Journal (1982) 9 155 Journal of Molecular Biology (1959) 10 137 Nature Structural Biology (1994) 11 79 Journal of Biomolecular NMR (1991) 12 72 FEBS Letters (1968) 13 51 European Journal of Biochemistry (1967) 14 45 Journal of Chemical Physics (1931) 15 44 Genes & Development (1987) 16 43 Proteins: Structure, Function and Genetics (1987) 16 43 Molecular and Cellular Biology (1981) 17 41 Trends in Biochemical Sciences (1976) 17 41 Analytical Biochemistry (1960) 18 39 Biophysical Journal (1960) 19 38 Protein Science (1992) 20 36 Methods in Enzymology (1955) 21 34 Current Opinion in Structural Biology (1991) 22 33 Structure (1993-1998) 22 33 Nucleic Acids Research (1974) 23 31 Oncogene (1987) 24 30 Current Biology (1991) 25 29 Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (1947) 26 28 Annual Review of Biochemistry (1932) 27 24 Journal of Applied Crystallography (1968) 28 23 Biopolymers (1961) 29 21 Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (1959) 30 19 Journal of Physical Chemistry (1896) 31 17 Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling (1983) 31 17 Biochemical Journal (1906) 32 16 Accounts of Chemical Research (1968) 32 16 Chemical Physics Letters (1967) 32 16 Journal of Virology (1967) 33 15 Macromolecules (1968) 34 13 Chemistry and Physics of Lipids (1967) 34 13 Journal of Experimental Medicine (1896) 35 11 Molecular Biology of the Cell (1990) 35 11 An Analysis of Journal Use by Structural Biologists 431 TABLE 4 (CONT.) Ranking of Journals According to Frequency Cited Journal Name (Date of Inception) Rank Number of Articles Journal o/ Bacteriology (1916) 35 11 Annual Review o/ Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure (1972) 35 11 Molecular Physics (1958) 36 10 Current Opinion in Cell Biology (1989) 36 10 Biological Magnetic Resonance (1978) 36 10 Protein Engineering (1986) 37 9 BioEssays (1984) 37 9 Journal o/ Chromatography A (1958) 38 8 Gene (1977) 38 8 Journal o/ Organic Chemistry (1936) 39 7 Journal o/ Immunology (1916) 40 6 Journal o/ Computational Chemistry (1980) 40 6 Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology (1980) 40 6 Molecular Pharmacology (1965) 40 6 Physical Review A (1893) 40 6 lished in 1996) to significantly reduce the likelihood of its use in the time period under examination. Although the other has been in existence for more than forty years, its primary focus is on cellular rather than molecular structure. Thus, although the size of a collection may not be significant, its content is. The complex character of structural biology can lead to an overemphasis on the importance of the established, multidisciplinary journals as opposed to the more narrowly focused titles. For ex­ ample, the large proportion of papers published in and cited from major titles such as Biochemistry, Cell, Nature, and the like may lead some subject bibliographers to de-emphasize titles such as Structure or Nature Structural Biology. However, when such titles are examined in light of their narrow focus, small size, and rela­ tive newness, they must be considered to be top-tier journals, particularly within the subdiscipline of structural biology. On this basis, the authors can reliably con­ clude from their analysis of citation and publication patterns that the following titles were relevant to their user popula­ tion: • Nature Structural Biology (1994) • Journal of Biomolecular NMR (1991) • Proteins: Structure, Function and Ge­ netics (1987) • Current Opinion in Structural Biol­ ogy (1991) • Structure (1993) • Journal of Magnetic Resonance (1969) This conclusion enabled the authors to submit a proposal to their provost for funding for subscriptions to these titles. The conclusion also suggests a strong case for establishing a subscription to Elsevier ’s ScienceDirect online journal package because many of the important journals are Elsevier titles. Moreover, al­ most all of the home institutions of the scientists involved in the Center subscribe to ScienceDirect; thus, they will be com­ ing to the City College campus with their expectations formed by their experience with that product. Some recent research has indicated a lack of statistical correlation between the size of library journal collections and the publishing activity of researchers served 432 College & Research Libraries September 2001 TABLE 5 Journals Proposed for Subscription and Their Impact Factors Impact Impact Total Total Factor Factor Journal Cites Articles (JCR) (Calculated) Journal of Magnetic Resonance 166 2 1.784* 83 Nature Structural Biology 79 4 10.782 19.75 Journal of Biomolecular NMR 72 5 5.154 14.4 Proteins: Structure, Function and Genetics 43 2 4.161 21.5 Current Opinion in Structural Biology 33 1 7.509 33 Structure 33 4 7.633 8.25 *This mumber is the average of two impact factors, because im 1997, the Journal of Magnetic Resonance was split into A and B sections. The two sections have since been merged to form a single ournal. by those collections.20 Such a finding could be interpreted as supportive of ar­ guments in favor of access (through print and online indexing and abstracting ser­ vices and the like) as opposed to owner­ ship. Indeed, in an environment of steep inflation rates and scarce resources, such a model would be preferred. Neverthe­ less, research faculty members continue to express dissatisfaction with the status of libraries because they believe their re­ search needs should be satisfied by the library collections. Moreover, there is a body of research that the authors have already cited that supports the impor­ tance of the content of library collections. Thus, although the size of a collection may not be significant, its content is. In the face of smaller journal collections, re­ searchers may maintain high levels of participation in the process of scholarly communications; however, such collec­ tions must be focused on the needs of the researchers as indicated by their citation and publication patterns. Ownership of a core of important journals remains the primary means of supporting research, whether that ownership is accomplished through paper subscriptions or various forms of online access. Notes 1. These institutions include Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, Mount Sinai Medical School, New York University School of Medicine, Rockefeller University, and the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health. 2. John C. Kendrew, “Some Remarks on the History of Molecular Biology,” Biochemical Soci­ ety Symposium 30 (1970): 5–10. 3. Christopher M. Smith, “Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics: Scientific Discovery Advances as Technology Paves the Path,” Scientist 14 (Nov. 27, 2000): 26. 4. David C. Phillips, “The Three-dimensional Structure of an Enzyme Molecule,” Scientific American 215 (Nov. 1966): 78–90. 5. Stephen S. Hall, “Protein Images Update Natural History,” Science 267 (Feb. 3, 1995): 621. 6. Howard D. White and Katherine W. McCain, “Bibliometrics,” Annual Review of Informa­ tion Science and Technology 24 (1989): 119–65. 7. Janet Hughes, “Use of Faculty Publication Lists and ISI Citation Data to Identify a Core List of Journals with Local Importance,” Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory 19 (winter 1995): 403–13. 8. Julie M. Hurd, Deborah D. Blecic, and Rama Vishwanatham, “Information Use by Mo­ lecular Biologists: Implications for Library Collections and Services,” College & Research Libraries 60 (Jan. 1999): 31–43. http:collections.20 An Analysis of Journal Use by Structural Biologists 433 9. Amy Dykeman, “Faculty Citations: An Approach to Assessing the Impact of Diminishing Resources on Scientific Research,” Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory 18 (summer 1994): 137–46. 10. Eugene Garfield, “The Impact Factor.” (June 20, 1994). Accessed Jan 24, 2001, http://www.isinet.com/isi/hot/essays/journalcitationreports/7.html. 11. M. B. M. Campbell, “A Survey of the Use of Science Periodicals in Wolverhampton Poly­ technic Library,” Research in Librarianship 5 (May 1974): 39–71. 12. Elizabeth Pan, “Journal Citation as a Predictor of Journal Usage in Libraries,” Collection Management 2 (spring 1978): 29–34 13. Dykeman, “Faculty Citations.” 14. Hurd, Blecic, and Vishwanatham, “Information Use by Molecular Biologists.” 15. Hughes, “Use of Faculty Publication Lists and ISI Citation Data.” 16. S. M. Dhawan, S. K. Phull, and S. P. Jain, “Selection of Scientific Journals: A Model,” Jour­ nal of Documentation 36 (Mar. 1980): 24–32. 17. Ibid., 29. 18. Pan, “Journal Citation as a Predictor of Journal Usage in Libraries,” 32. 19. Hughes, “Use of Faculty Publication Lists and ISI Citation Data,” 406. 20. Gary D. Byrd, “Medical Faculty Use of the Journal Literature, Publishing Productivity and the Size of Health Sciences Library Journal Collections,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Asso­ ciation 87 (July 1999): 312–21. http://www.isinet.com/isi/hot/essays/journalcitationreports/7.html