Top universities, top libraries: do research services in academic libraries contribute to university output?

Abstract

[Abstract] University context is nowadays mostly characterized by the implementation of competitiveness and cost-effectiveness criteria. There are two main characteristics of the new management model: a new relevancy to the university funding and the predominance of the research criteria as excellence indicator. Evidence of the growing role of research in universities are the parameters to rank the excellence of higher education institutions, such as ARWU (Academic Ranking of World Universities) of the University of Shangai, SIR (SCImago Institutions Rankings) or the THE (Times Higher Education World University Rankings). The research orientation also imposes to the academic library, with the growing implementation of services to support research. Evidences are at last reports about trends in academic libraries by ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries), especially at the latest edition: The 2015 Environmental Scan of Academics Libraries. The international survey Bridging the Librarian-Faculty Gap in the Academic Library (2015) also emphasizes the greater impact and relevance of the academic library to research, stressing the perception of the library as essential in this process. This paper tries to establish a connection between excellent universities and the research oriented services by their libraries. Our research hypothesis is: the universities at the top of the rankings have libraries that provide excellent services to support research processes. Ten of the top universities at the ARWU and Times rankings are used as sample and their libraries services analyzed. As research method we used the observation of the selected libraries webpages, with a checklist where the most relevant services to support research processes are identified.