RE: UKSG Usage Factor Research - an Update

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Jan Veltrop wrote:

> "Suppose we can be confident that we understand the statistics, 
> does usage determine the value of journals and articles in the 
> first place?"
Phil Davis responds:

Like citations, usage statistics do not give us an absolute 
notion of value of journals or articles, yet they do provide us 
with a measure of utility, and for the sciences, utility is a 
very powerful measure for how ideas get transmitted through 
communities and are incorporated into current research.  Unlike 
citations, usage statistics give us a sense of the community of 
readers (which include authors) and not just the author 
community.  Article downloads provide a robust estimate of the 
size of user communities [1], and are also predictive of future 
citations [2, 3].  In fact, a single week of article downloads 
from BMJ can predict citations five years later [3].

There are caveats, however, to relying on article downloads as a 
measure of "value".

1.  Downloads are not public (like citations) and are therefore 
open to self-interested abuse, by authors, publishers, or 
librarians.

2. Downloads are influenced by a publisher's interface.  Even 
COUNTER-compliant publishers (who abide by the same measurement 
standards) demonstrate significantly different usage patterns, 
even controlling for exactly the same journal content [4].

3. Unlike citations, download data are the property of the 
subscribing institution, and for contractual or political 
reasons, may not wish to share and aggregate these data.

4. Because of article copies being located in many different 
places (from the publisher's site, an aggregator's database, a 
subject, institutional, governmental, or personal archive), 
aggregating these statistics becomes problematic.

As a former science librarian, I trust that most librarians are 
smart enough not to base journal decisions on only one evaluative 
factor, be it use, citations, or faculty complaints.  Given that 
the future of journal publishing is not likely to be a 
universally simplistic author-pays model, usage factors can be 
very helpful in helping librarians understand what quality means.

--Phil Davis

NOTES:

[1] Davis, P. M. (2004). For electronic journals, total downloads 
can predict number of users: a multiple regression analysis. 
Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4(3), 379-392. 
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/pmd8/4.3davis.pdf

[2] Moed, H. F. (2005). Statistical relationships between 
downloads and citations at the level of individual documents 
within a single journal. Journal of the American Society for 
Information Science and Technology, 56(10), 1088-1097.

[3] Perneger, T. V. (2004). Relation between online "hit counts" 
and subsequent citations: prospective study of research papers in 
the BMJ. BMJ, 329(7465), 546-547.

[4] Davis, P. M., & Price, J. S. (2006). eJournal interface can 
influence usage statistics: implications for libraries, 
publishers, and Project COUNTER. Journal of the American Society 
for Information Science and Technology, 57(9), 1243-1248. 
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/pmd8/interface.pdf

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