The impact of electronic theses and dissertations: a study of the institutional repository of a university in South Africa

This paper investigates the academic and societal impacts of the engineering electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) at the North-West University. The citation counts obtained through Google Scholar (GS) and the altmetrics data obtained from Dspace on the North-West University institutional repository are used to determine these impacts. Further, the conversion rates of ETDs from an educational output into an academic research output are determined using data from GS and the North-West University institutional repository. The results show that the 612 theses and dissertations attracted 931 citations which translates to 1.52 citations per thesis on average. A total of 41.2% theses and dissertations received at least one citation and the conversion rate into academic research output was 16.8%. The conversion rates in the last 3 years that are part of this research is 27.3% which suggests an improvement. An average of 323 PDF views were received per thesis. The citation and PDF views data show that the Engineering ETDs have commendable academic and societal impacts. Nonetheless, the academic impacts show scant correlation with the societal impacts although some positive trends are noticeable when looking at the origin of PDF views and citations by country.

[1]  Bladimir Díaz Borges.  Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities , 2008 .

[2]  Radhamany Sooryamoorthy.  THE VISIBILITY OF ENGINEERING RESEARCH IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1975-2005 , 2010 .

[3]  Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha,et al.  A Citation Analysis of Sub-Saharan African Library and Information Science Journals using Google Scholar , 2009 .

[4]  team Impactstory,et al.  Foreward to Meaningful Metrics: A 21st Century Librarian's Guide to Bibliometrics, Altmetrics, and Research Impact , 2015 .

[5]  Ifeanyi J. Ezema,et al.  Electronic theses and dissertations in Nigeria university libraries: Status, challenges and strategies , 2013, Electron. Libr..

[6]  O. B. Onyancha,et al.  Research collaboration in the archives and records management field across and beyond universities in Africa : an informetric analysis , 2016 .

[8]  Tránsito Ferreras-Fernández,et al.  Providing open access to PhD theses: visibility and citation benefits , 2016, Program.

[9]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Can the impact of non‐Western academic books be measured? An investigation of Google Books and Google Scholar for Malaysia , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[10]  松田 直人.  『Google Scholar』の利点 , 2009 .

[11]  Philip J. Calvert.  Altmetrics: A Practical Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Academics , 2017, Electron. Libr..

[12]  Z. Rosenberg.  Citation Analysis of M.A. Theses and Ph.D. Dissertations in Sociology and Anthropology: An Assessment of Library Resource Usage , 2015 .

[13]  Lutz Bornmann,et al.  Do altmetrics point to the broader impact of research? An overview of benefits and disadvantages of altmetrics , 2014, J. Informetrics.

[14]  Gwenda Thomas.  EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF THE INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY, OR POSITIONING INNOVATION BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE , 2007 .

[15]  Derek Rowntree,et al.  A dictionary of education , 1980 .

[16]  Wanyenda Chilimo.  GREEN OPEN ACCESS IN KENYA: A REVIEW OF THE CONTENT, POLICIES AND USAGE OF INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES , 2016 .

[17]  Aquil Ahmed,et al.  Theses and dissertations in institutional repositories: an Asian perspective , 2014 .

[18]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  National research impact indicators from Mendeley readers , 2015, J. Informetrics.

[19]  J. Fasae.  Citation Analysis of Dissertations and Theses Submitted to the Department of Agricultural Economics And Extension, Federal University of Technology Akure, Nigeria , 2012 .

[20]  Y. Alamri,et al.  Publication rates and characteristics of undergraduate medical theses in New Zealand. , 2016, The New Zealand medical journal.

[21]  Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha.  A citation analysis of Sub-Saharan African LIS journals using Google Scholar , 2009 .

[22]  Enrique Orduña-Malea,et al.  Google Scholar and the gray literature: A reply to Bonato's review , 2017, ArXiv.

[23]  Yu-Wei Chang,et al.  Influence of Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort on Library and Information Science Research , 2016, ISSI.

[24]  Danny P. Wallace,et al.  Knowledge into Action: Research And Evaluation In Library And Information Science , 2012 .

[25]  Cassidy R. Sugimoto,et al.  Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact , 2015, Online Inf. Rev..

[26]  Dennis N. Ocholla,et al.  Assessing researchers' performance in developing countries : is Google Scholar an alternative? , 2009 .

[27]  Kathryn J. Skhal,et al.  Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders (WISER) , 2006 .

[28]  Karen C. Kohn,et al.  Citation Analysis as a Tool for Collection Development and Instruction , 2014 .

[29]  Rosario Arquero Avilés,et al.  Altmetrics in Institutional Repositories: New Perspectives for Assessing Research Impact , 2014 .

[30]  Andy Tattersall.  Altmetrics: A Practical Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Academics , 2016 .

[31]  Chris Rensleigh,et al.  Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar: A content comprehensiveness comparison , 2013, Electron. Libr..

[32]  Jesse R. O'Hanley,et al.  Using Google Scholar institutional level data to evaluate the quality of university research , 2017, Scientometrics.

[33]  Clarence Helm,et al.  Relevance of Library Collections for Graduate Student Research: A Citation Analysis Study of Doctoral Dissertations at Notre Dame , 2012, Coll. Res. Libr..

[34]  O. B. Onyancha.  Altmetrics of South African Journals: Implications for Scholarly Impact of South African Research , 2016 .

[35]  Cameron Barnes,et al.  The Use of Altmetrics as a Tool for Measuring Research Impact , 2015 .

[36]  A. Gohain,et al.  CITATION ANALYSIS OF PH.D THESES SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF CHEMICAL SCIENCES, TEZPUR UNIVERSITY, ASSAM , 2014 .

[37]  Marianne A. Buehler.  Demystifying the Institutional Repository for Success , 2013 .

[38]  O. B. Onyancha,et al.  A Bibliometric Analysis of Health and Medical Journals: Issues in Medical Scholarly Communication in Africa , 2016 .

[39]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Mendeley readership altmetrics for medical articles: An analysis of 45 fields , 2016, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[40]  Enrique Orduña-Malea,et al.  Methods for estimating the size of Google Scholar , 2014, Scientometrics.

[41]  S. Bonato.  Google Scholar and Scopus , 2016 .

[42]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  The declining scientific impact of theses: Implications for electronic thesis and dissertation repositories and graduate studies , 2008, Scientometrics.

[43]  Masaki Nishizawa,et al.  A study on the academic and research impact of shared contents in institutional repositories in related to performance indicators of university rankings , 2016, ASIST.

[44]  José Luis Ortega,et al.  Relationship between altmetric and bibliometric indicators across academic social sites: The case of CSIC's members , 2015, J. Informetrics.

[45]  Linda Bennett,et al.  Measuring the impact of digitized theses: a case study from the London School of Economics , 2016 .

[46]  C. C. Wolhuter.  The scholarly impact of doctoral research conducted in the field of education in South Africa , 2015 .

[47]  P. Gross,et al.  COLLEGE LIBRARIES AND CHEMICAL EDUCATION. , 1927, Science.

[48]  Jane Burns.  Altmetrics: a Practical Guide for Librarians, Researchers, and Academics , 2018, DBS Business Review.

[49]  Deborah J. Rumsey,et al.  Statistics for dummies , 2011 .

[50]  Chris Rensleigh,et al.  Comparing Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar from an Environmental Sciences perspective , 2011 .

[51]  A. Huber-Lee.  Research for Impact , 2009 .

[52]  Margaret E.S. Forrest.  A Dictionary of Education (2nd edition) , 2015 .

[53]  Lokman I. Meho.  The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis , 2006, ArXiv.

[54]  Francisco J. García-Peñalvo,et al.  Open access repositories as channel of publication scientific grey literature , 2015, TEEM '15.

[55]  Felicitas Ciabere Ratanya,et al.  Institutional repository: access and use by academic staff at Egerton University, Kenya , 2017 .

[56]  Earl R. Babbie,et al.  The practice of social research , 1969 .

[57]  Stephanie M Swanberg.  GOOGLE SCHOLAR AND SCOPUS FOR FINDING GRAY LITERATURE PUBLICATIONS , 2016 .

[58]  Jaya Raju,et al.  Open Scholarship Practices Reshaping South Africa's Scholarly Publishing Roadmap , 2015, Publ..

[59]  Thed N. van Leeuwen,et al.  Using Google Scholar in research evaluation of humanities and social science programs: A comparison with Web of Science data , 2016 .

[60]  E. Chiware,et al.  Citation Analysis of Masters' Theses and Doctoral Dissertations: Balancing Library Collections With Students' Research Information Needs , 2015 .

[61]  Victoria Itsekor,et al.  CITATION ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH: A CASE STUDY OF BACHELOR DEGREE RESEARCH PROJECT REPORTS OF A NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY 2009-2013 , 2014 .