Page 45 - Becoming Metric Wise

34 Becoming Metric-Wise

the era before electronic journals scientists browsed the contents of newly
arrived journals, and if interested in a particular article made a photocopy.
Maybe they would actually read the article and use it in their own
research. In this series of events downloading of full-text articles can be
compared to making a photocopy in the preelectronic days.
Collecting download numbers per journal, let alone per article is not
obvious if the interested party is not the owner of the repository or the
publisher of the journal. COUNTER, launched in 2002, an agreed inter-
national set of standards and protocols governing the recording and
exchange of online usage data (http://www.projectcounter.org) is a par-
tial solution for this. For more information about COUNTER we refer
the reader to Conyers (2006), Davis and Price (2006), and Shepherd
(2006). COUNTER is able to provide more and more reliable statistics
for librarians and vendors, yet was originally designed to measure the use
(views) of databases and certainly not of individual articles.
Based on their data COUNTER proposed a journal usage factor (JUF)
for journals, which is nothing but the median number of downloads for arti-
cles in that journal during a given period of time. Note that COUNTER
initially defined the JUF as an average in analogy of the journal impact factor
which is an average number of citations per article (for details we refer to
Chapter 6: Journal Citation Analysis). As this is a COUNTER metrics,
downloads only refer to COUNTER-compliant online usage.
A report (CIBER Research Ltd., 2011) found no evidence that usage (as
measured by an average) and citation impact metrics are statistically associated.
The authors note that this is hardly surprising since author and reader
populations are not necessarily the same. This is in particular the case for
journals which have practitioners or students as their main readership.
A similar remark about the relationship between downloads and citations was
made by Davis (2011). As a result, the usage factor or other usage statistics add
new evidence to our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the use
of the scientific literature. It also opens up the possibility of developing new
ways of looking at scholarly communication, with different journals
occupying very different niches within a complex ecosystem. Some
colleagues, however, claim that article downloads retrieved shortly after publi-
cation can predict future citations, but their strength of prediction is relatively
low(Kurtzetal.,2005a,b;Schlo ¨gl & Gorraiz, 2010).
Knowing the number of downloads of articles published in a publish-
er’s journals is of interest for the publisher as a means to evaluate the
impact (mostly immediate impact) of its journals. Also downloads of
e-prints in repositories are of interest for authors and publishers alike.