Applying statistical methods to library data analysis

Abstract

This article describes two projects at The College of New Jersey Library that used statistical methods and the programming language R to analyze electronic usage data. Project one utilized simple linear regression to model the monthly database search and full text usage data of eight years from 2010 to 2017. In project two, Pearson correlation was applied to analyzing the relationship between the journal’s impact factor and the journal’s full text downloads. It was found that there is a moderate positive relationship between these two variables.