¿Que utilizan nuestros usuarios investigadores hospitalarios? Evaluación de la colección en cuatro bibliotecas hospitalarias basado en el análisis de citas bibliográficas de la producción científica de una especialidad médica

INTRODUCTION: The increase of the scientific production, the price of the journal subscriptions and the volume of the consortia puchases along the last years, has made unavoidable the optimization of the management of the collections. Libraries carry out a continuous evaluation of their collection in order to build a basic and strong one that satisfies the needs of the users, thus achieving a balance between utility, quality and price. As a complement to other usage evaluation methods, some libraries are using the analysis of bibliographical citations of the scientific production of their users-researchers. REVISION-OBJECTIVE-HYPOTHESIS: We carried out a complete bibliographical revision on the analysis of citations as a method for the evaluation of the usage of the collections. Then we established the hypothesis that it was a good indicator to know the relevancy of the collection. We evaluated the collection of four libraries. METHODOLOGY: We looked for the scientific production of the Service of Neurology in 2006 in the most important databases. We analyzed the citations and their distribution and frequency, their presence in our collections (both individual and that of the consortium), of the rest of Spain and of outside of Spain, as well as their correlation. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Our last 10-year collections, both individual and consortium, satisfy more than 77% of the bibliographical citations used in the scientific production of our users. The citation analysis can be an effective tool to evaluate our collections at the present time so much as the basic collections that we keep