I last measured the use of RefWorks across the University in April (2008), and I meant to check it again six months later (i.e. October). Only slightly late, then, I can reveal that…
- In Apr. 2008 we had 348 registered users, of whom 276 (79%) had accessed it recently.
- In Dec. 2008 we had 778 registered users, of whom 461 (59%) had accessed it recently.
I’m using ‘recently’ to mean ‘in the last six months’.
So, our total registered users have doubled, which is gratifying, but proportionally we have fewer active users (i.e. those who have accessed RefWorks recently). I suspect the total number of registered users is a less meaningful number (because it’ll contain a number of students whose AD accounts have expired, but whose accounts remain on RefWorks, plus people who registered for an account out of curiosity, but who never returned). I’ll continue to monitor the number of active users.
461 people is approximately 4.27% of the total University (staff and students).
Breaking the users down by RefWorks User Type (with categories corresponding roughly to Horizon btype):
April 2008
December 2008
Not much of a change – a shift toward a greater number of undergraduates using RefWorks, demonstrating (I hope) that academic departments are encouraging use amongst their students – mainly at the expense of the figure for staff (many of whom will have registered early if they were interested at all, perhaps?). Proportion of postgraduates (both sorts) hasn’t changed much.
Doing the same for RefWorks Focus Area (which we’ve used for the faculties and extra-faculty departments):
April 2008
December 2008
More interesting: the faculty of Health, Life & Social Sciences have retained their dominance (expected, given their size and research focus, and the established use of bibliographic management software by key groups of researchers including CCAWI), but there’s been a growth in users from Business & Law and from Media, Humanities & Technology.
