EconStor Downloads now compliant with COUNTER

Posted: August 26th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Newspost | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on EconStor Downloads now compliant with COUNTER

In order to make the EconStor download numbers more comparable with other services, we now use the internationally established COUNTER standard to measure our download usage.
Moreover we supply not only the download counts for individual papers, but also for whole collections or even for institutions. Plus we provide information about the breakdown of downloads by country.
For more information, please click here.

Important aspect: We found, that the Download numbers measured via COUNTER only differ about 10-20% from our internal download numbers, that we have used before.


Open Access increases the “Superstar effect”

Posted: July 2nd, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Newspost | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on Open Access increases the “Superstar effect”

New Analysis on the impact of Open Access availability on citations finds out, that Open access increases cites to the top-ranked journals but reduces cites to lower-ranked journals.

Two Economists, Mark McCabe (University of Michigan School of Information) and Christopher Snyder (Dartmouth College), have published a new study of the impact of open access on citation rates for science journal content. McCabe and Snyder found that open access increases citation rates for high-quality content, while reducing citations to lower-quality content. In their paper, “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer: The Effect of Open Access on Cites to Science Journals Across the Quality Spectrum,” McCabe and Snyder construct a model to explain their findings, which was based on an analysis of 100 journals in ecology, botany, and general science. The authors document what they call a “superstar effect,” in which the benefits of open access (namely, increased citations) accrue to higher quality content and journals, while lower-tier content does not receive such benefits.

Mark McCabe, a research investigator at the University of Michigan School of Information, and Christopher Snyder, a faculty member in Economics at Dartmouth College, have published a new study of the impact of open access on citation rates for science journal content. McCabe and Snyder found that open access increases citation rates for high-quality content, while reducing citations to lower-quality content. In their paper, “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer: The Effect of Open Access on Cites to Science Journals Across the Quality Spectrum,” McCabe and Snyder construct a model to explain their findings, which was based on an analysis of 100 journals in ecology, botany, and general science. The authors document what they call a “superstar effect,” in which the benefits of open access (namely, increased citations) accrue to higher quality content and journals, while lower-tier content does not receive such benefits. – See more at: http://www.publishing.umich.edu/2013/06/07/new-research-on-open-access/#sthash.8YrgShrw.dpuf
Mark McCabe, a research investigator at the University of Michigan School of Information, and Christopher Snyder, a faculty member in Economics at Dartmouth College, have published a new study of the impact of open access on citation rates for science journal content. McCabe and Snyder found that open access increases citation rates for high-quality content, while reducing citations to lower-quality content. In their paper, “The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer: The Effect of Open Access on Cites to Science Journals Across the Quality Spectrum,” McCabe and Snyder construct a model to explain their findings, which was based on an analysis of 100 journals in ecology, botany, and general science. The authors document what they call a “superstar effect,” in which the benefits of open access (namely, increased citations) accrue to higher quality content and journals, while lower-tier content does not receive such benefits. – See more at: http://www.publishing.umich.edu/2013/06/07/new-research-on-open-access/#sthash.8YrgShrw.dpuf

Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers

Posted: February 14th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , , , | 3 Comments »

New study finds strong correlation between the relationship between Twitter mentions and both article downloads and article citations

A new study by Xin Shuai, Alberto Pepe and Johan Bollen analyzes the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. Based on a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011 they study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter, and how they are cited in the scholarly record.

They find that Twitter mentions follow rapidly after article submission and that they are correlated with later article downloads and later article citations, indicating that social media may be an important factor in determining the scientific impact of an article.

This fits very well with a study from 2011, where David McKenzie and Berk Özler analyze the Impact of Economics Blogs They found out, that “links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers.”