The impact of electronic theses and dissertations: a study of the institutional repository of a university in South Africa

Siviwe Bangani ()
Additional contact information
Siviwe Bangani: North-West University

Scientometrics, 2018, vol. 115, issue 1, No 7, 151 pages

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the academic and societal impacts of the engineering electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) at the North-West University. The citation counts obtained through Google Scholar (GS) and the altmetrics data obtained from Dspace on the North-West University institutional repository are used to determine these impacts. Further, the conversion rates of ETDs from an educational output into an academic research output are determined using data from GS and the North-West University institutional repository. The results show that the 612 theses and dissertations attracted 931 citations which translates to 1.52 citations per thesis on average. A total of 41.2% theses and dissertations received at least one citation and the conversion rate into academic research output was 16.8%. The conversion rates in the last 3 years that are part of this research is 27.3% which suggests an improvement. An average of 323 PDF views were received per thesis. The citation and PDF views data show that the Engineering ETDs have commendable academic and societal impacts. Nonetheless, the academic impacts show scant correlation with the societal impacts although some positive trends are noticeable when looking at the origin of PDF views and citations by country.

Keywords: Institutional repositories; Theses and dissertations; Google Scholar; Altmetrics; Bibliometrics; Impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-018-2657-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:115:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-018-2657-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-018-2657-2

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().