EconStor now in RePec TOP 10

Latest statistics sees EconStor among the ten most heavily used archives in RePec

Most Economists know, that RePEc publishes rankings on publications, authors and research institutions.  Less known is the fact, that RePec also provides statistics on it’s contributing archives and how they perform. These archives can come from university faculties (e.g. for their working papers), from publishers (for their journals) or from repositories (either institutional or subject based). A ranking of the largest archives is provided on the RePEc homepage (see also screenshot on the right).

As a subject repository with a focus on the German Economics community EconStor provides it’s RePEc input services for over 100 institutions, which places as amont the TOP 20 archives with respect to size.

But even more pleasant (and also more important to our customers) is the fact, that papers on EconStor are also heavily used. Looking at the detailed LogEc statistics for all contributing archives in RePEc, we find that EconStor (acronym “zbw”) is at number 10 concerning the use of our archives (number of downloads).

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.

Social Media are important for the impact of Academic Papers

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.”

EconStor in January 2012

We are happy to announce the following working and discussion paper series which have been added to EconStor in January 2012:

• Discussion Papers, Research Professorship & Project “The Future of Fiscal Federalism”, Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB)
• Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Behavior, Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB)
• KOF Studies, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich
• Public Policy Briefs, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
• Working Papers on Risk and Insurance, Institute for Risk and Insurance, University of Hamburg
• Working Papers, Institute of Marketing, Technische Universität Braunschweig
• Bayreuth Working Papers on Finance, Accounting and Taxation (FAcT-Papers), Chair of Finance and Banking, University of Bayreuth

By offering more than 35,500 full texts overall, we have counted exactly 103,557 pdf downloads during this month. The Top 5 downloads in January by number of downloads were:

1. Yadav, Pradeep K.; Megginson, William L.; Chakrabarti, Rajesh: „Corporate governance in India“  (1288 downloads)
2. Bouza, Carlos; Juárez, Octaviano; Santiago, Agustín: „Un estudio de las potencialidades del mercado para el consumo de agua purificada de la fuente de Azinyahualco“   (1183)
3. Bauer, Thomas K.: „High Performance Workplace Practices and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from Europe“ (806)
4. Mueller, Gerrit; Plug, Erik: „Estimating the Effect of Personality on Male-Female Earnings“ (577)
5. Auria, Laura; Moro, Rouslan A.: „Support Vector Machines (SVM) as a technique for solvency analysis“ (553)