Scatter of journals and literature obsolescence reflected in document delivery requests

In this paper we investigate the scattering of journals and literature obsolescence reflected in more than 137,000 document delivery requests submitted to a national document delivery service. We first summarize the major findings of the study with regards to the performance of the service. We then identify the “core” journals from which article requests were satisfied and address the following research questions: (a) Does the distribution of (core) journals conform to the Bradford's Law of Scattering? (b) Is there a relationship between usage of journals and impact factors, journals with high impact factors being used more often than the rest? (c) Is there a relationship between usage of journals and total citation counts, journals with high total citation counts being used more often than the rest? (d) What is the median age of use (half‐life) of requested articles in general? (e) Do requested articles that appear in core journals get obsolete more slowly? (f) Is there a relationship between obsolescence and journal impact factors, journals with high impact factors being obsolete more slowly? (g) Is there a relationship between obsolescence and total citation counts, journals with high total citation counts being obsolete more slowly? Based on the analysis of findings, we found that the distribution of highly and moderately used journal titles conform to Bradford's Law. The median age of use was 8 years for all requested articles. Ninety percent of the articles requested were 21 years of age or younger. Articles that appeared in 168 core journal titles seem to get obsolete slightly more slowly than those of all titles. We observed no statistically significant correlations between the frequency of journal use and ISI journal impact factors, and between the frequency of journal use and ISI‐ (Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, PA) cited half‐lives for the most heavily used 168 core journal titles. There was a weak correlation between usage of journals and ISI‐reported total citation counts. No statistically significant relationship was found between median age of use and journal impact factors and between median age of use and total citation counts. There was a weak negative correlation between ISI journal impact factors and cited half‐lives of 168 core journals, and a weak correlation between ISI citation half‐lives and use half‐lives of core journals. No correlation was found between cited half‐lives of 168 core journals and their corresponding total citation counts as reported by ISI. Findings of the current study are discussed along with those of other studies.