Abstract

This study aims to analyze the relationship between acquisition costs, resource usage, and faculty research performance at large universities and to provide empirical evidence for developing strategic initiatives and optimizing resource allocation in university libraries. The study examined 59 large universities with over 10,000 enrolled students. The findings indicate that while acquisition costs and spending on electronic resources have increased, the number of loans and overall publication output of full-time faculty members have declined. Conversely, SCI/SCOPUS publication output and the number of cited papers have shown an upward trend. A significant positive correlation was identified between SCI/SCOPUS publication output and both international publication output and the number of top 1% most-cited papers. This study recommends that university libraries enhance their research support by adopting performance-based resource allocation strategies, establishing quantitative evaluation metrics, fostering researcher-centered collaboration, tailoring resource management to specific disciplines, and improving government support for electronic resource subscriptions.