Subscriber Surveys
As opposed to the gopher statistics, which give breadth but little depth, our surveys offer the opportunity for deeper study of our users but at the expense of breadth. We cannot survey our subscribers too often or they will not respond.[8] A further limitation is that we felt we could not survey those who take both BMCR and BMMR, a significant number, without skewing the results, since many subscribers lean heavily toward one journal or the other and the journals are significantly different in some ways. So far we have conducted five surveys:
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1. a 20-question survey in November 1995 to BMCR subscribers
2. a 21-question survey in February 1996 to BMMR subscribers
3. a 2-question survey in October 1996 to all subscribers[9]
4. a 15-question survey in January 1997 to all BMCR reviewers whose e-mail addresses we knew
5. a 2-question survey in March 1997 to those who have canceled subscriptions in the past year
Table 12.6 presents the subscriber profile as revealed in the surveys. Many of the differences are easily explained by the checkered history of BMMR or by the differing natures of the two readerships.[10] I doubt many readers will be surprised to learn that medievalists are more often female and less often faculty. The paucity of reader-reviewers of BMMR reflects the paucity of BMMR reviews. To me, the most surprising statistic is the low use of gopher by subscribers to either journal.
The key question, of course, is willingness to pay for subscriptions. With that in mind, we did some correlation studies for the BMCR survey, first seeing what variables correlated with a willingness to pay $5 for a subscription.[11] We found posi-
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tive correlation (Pearson product-moment correlation) with the following categories:
• ever found review useful for teaching (r = .19,.00037 likelihood of a chance correlation)
• ever found review useful for research (r = .21, .00005)
• ever hear a reference to BMCR (r = .23, .00001)
• ever written a review for BMCR (r = .17, .00084)
Further correlations were found, some not at all surprising:
• start to read many/most reviews//heard a reference to BMCR (r = .20, .00014)
• willing to review//heard a reference to BMCR (r = .22, .00002)
• get paper BMCR//have written review (r = .22, .00002)
• have written review//will write in future (r = .24, .00000)
• will write in future//library gets BMCR (r = .21, .00005)
• Ph.D. //willing to review (r = .24, .00000)
• institutional affiliation//useful for teaching (r = .21, .00009)
• useful for teaching//useful for research (r = .25, .00000)
• heard a reference/ /willing to review (r = .22 , .00002)
A follow-up two-question survey done in October 1996 asked whether subscribers would prefer to pay for e-mail subscription, receive advertisements from publishers, or cancel. Fourteen percent preferred to pay, 82% to receive advertisements, and 4% to cancel.
Our most recent survey, of those who had for one reason or another dropped from the list of subscribers, revealed that almost a third were no longer valid addresses and so were not true cancellations. Of those who responded, almost half (40,44%) of the unsubscriptions were only temporary (Table 12.7). The reason for cancellation was rarely the quality of the review.