Measuring the Impact of Institutional Repositories in selected Zimbabwean State Universities

Abstract

Purpose
This paper reports on a study that was conducted to investigate the citation impact of institutional repositories (IRs) in selected Zimbabwean state universities using the Scopus cited reference search facility. The study assessed the extent to which archived content is cited by publications indexed in Scopus.

Design/methodology/approach
The Scopus cited references search facility was used to mine for documents citing IR content from 2014 to 2018. Results from Scopus searches were exported into text files then transported to excel workbooks for filtering and analysis. The impact of an IR was analysed from two perspectives; cited and citing documents characteristics including but not limited to the number of publications, document types and country affiliation of citing authors.

Findings
Results show that on average 8.6 documents per year were cited for all IRs combined within the 5 year period selected for the study. The most frequent Scopus indexed document type citing IR content were research articles, constituting over 50% of all citing documents across all IRs selected for the study. The most cited document types in all IRs were thesis and dissertations followed by research articles. The University of Zimbabwe IR was found to be the most influential, with 34 citers affiliated in 12 countries.

Originality/value
The study demonstrated the feasibility of using the Scopus cited reference searching facility to mine for documents citing IRs. The research puts forward a new measure of research impact which involves analysing the extent to which IR content is cited by documents indexed in a major commercial citation database (Scopus).