A Survey of Costs- Benefit of Databases in Yazd University in 2009

The aim of this study is to analyze the cost spent on databases in Yazd University and compare it with the amount of use of the resources by users

A survey has been conducted. The cost - benefit analysis of Science Direct, ProQuest and EBSCO has been calculated by securing financial information about the subscription fee, and the numbers of articles have been downloaded in 2009.

The cost - benefit of the three databases, respectively, are 65,814, 21,572, 6,653 Rials. 29.24% of all publications in Science Direct haven’t been used at all. In terms of the frequency of use, only 2 of the 7 subset of EBSCO have been used more heavily. 53/34% of the total articles from ProQuestare covered in one of its subsets. The databases are ranked based on their cost - benefit is Science Direct, ProQuest, and EBSCO