Accessibility and Amount of Usage of Electronic Resources among Dental Assistants at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti Universities of Medical Sciences, and Shahed Universities of Medical Sciences

Scholars of different fields need open-access and subscribed electronic resources to access scientific information. However, with the increasing growth of electronic resources and the replacement of printed materials with digital collections, the way we access these resources has changed significantly. Thus, the objective of this study was to assess how dental assistants at Tehran Universities of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti Universities of Medical Sciences, and Shahed Universities of Medical Sciences access and use electronic resources.
This was a descriptive-analytical study. The statistic population consisted of 267 dental assistants at the abovementioned universities. The data collection tool was a researcher-designed questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by faculty members in the field of Medical Librarianship and Information Sciences and its reliability was approved using Cronbach's alpha (α = 0.88). The collected data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis test.
ScienceDirect and PubMed were the most used electronic resources among subscribed and open-access databases, respectively. Participants most often used the subscribed resources which were available at work or home. The respondents reported low internet speed as their most important barrier to accessing information.
Dental assistants used subscribed resources which were available at work or university more than others in order to access the full text of subscribed electronic resources. Improving technology and Internet broadband infrastructures would also help decrease the limitations and problems in accessing required information.