Document delivery as a source for bibliometric analyses: the case of Subito

This paper deals with a bibliometric analysis of data from the document delivery service Subito. After a short introduction, Subito will be presented briefly. The main part reports on the design and the results of the study, which covers the following major topics: distribution of article orders to journals, identification of the core journals which contribute to most article supplies, subject distribution of the most requested journals, relation between the most requested (Subito) and the most cited journals (SCI), differences in age of ordered and cited articles, and dependency of journal requests on their subscription rates. As will be shown, most Subito article orders are covered by a relatively small number of journals, most of which are from life sciences, especially medicine. There is only a slight overlap between the most requested and the most cited journals suggesting that these two indicators represent different concepts. This is also confirmed by different obsolescence characteristics. The share of current publications is much higher among ordered than among cited articles. Finally, there was no evidence that articles of journals with higher subscription rates are ordered more often.