E-Journals and E-Publishers: A Research Study of Use Patterns among Aerospace Scientists and Engineers of Bangalore

With the coming of e-resources, there has been a significant transformation by which scholarly information is disseminated throughout the world. There is no doubt that the arrival of e-journals has greatly affected the way a scientist or an engineer seeks this information, acquires it and then uses it effectively for scholarly scientific pursuits. Today, scientists and engineers use electronic resources because of quick, easy access, and convenience. Also, very little effort is required to retrieve information from these e-resources. Over the last half a century, numerous studies have indicated that journals are extensively read, the information they contain is extremely useful for research, teaching and life-long learning, and the information is valuable in terms of the favourable outcomes from its use. A large number of e-journals from reputed e-publishers are frequently referred by the aerospace scientists and engineers of Bangalore for their day to day research work, for keeping updated in their subject, for increasing scholarly productivity and to be current with global R&D. A research survey was undertaken to ascertain the ‘Use Patterns of e-Journals from reputed e-Publishers’ amongst the aerospace scientists and engineers of selected aerospace organizations of Bangalore. The study is restricted to the geographic boundary of the city of Bangalore and the selected e-Publishers listed below. From the survey questionnaire distributed to these scientists and engineers it was found that, the total percentage of responses usable from all the 16 aerospace organizations amounted to 89.7 percent. The analysis is based on the responses received from the aerospace scientists and engineers representing these selected aerospace organizations. The responses from the participants towards the use of ‘e-Journals from e-Publishers were graded on a scale of 4 to 0, 4 representing ‘Daily’ and ‘0’ representing ‘Never Use’. The major findings that the authors would like to report in this paper are: (a) Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was applied for testing the significant difference among the mean scores attained from 16 aerospace organizations towards the Use Patterns of ’e-Journals from reputed e-Publishers’. It is observed that all the 16 aerospace organizations show a significant difference (P < 0.05) in their mean scores viz., ‘Elsevier’, ‘Springer Link’, ‘Taylor and Francis’, ‘Emerald’, ‘John Wiley (Inter – Science)’, ‘Blackwell’, ‘Cambridge University Press (CUP)’, ‘Oxford University Press (OUP)’, ‘Elsevier – Science Direct’, ‘Journal of Atmospheric Sciences’, ‘Air force – Airman’ and ‘Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technologies’