A bibliometric approach to evaluating the impact of national libraries

Abstract

In order to understand the value to society of a national library, it is essential to go beyond counting usage figures and understand impacts; 'the difference that the library makes'. The paper suggests that, for the National Library of Scotland (NLS), a key impact is the generation of new knowledge. A viable proxy for measuring this impact is establishing the number of publications produced in which the authors cite the use of NLS collections or services. The paper proposes a simple methodology for estimating the number of such research outputs through a bibliometric analysis of Google Scholar and other research resources.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.