Comments on: The Article Download Game

By: Pubget: Time-saver or Content Aggregator? « The Scholarly Kitchen

Pubget: Time-saver or Content Aggregator? « The Scholarly Kitchen — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:25:00 +0000

[...] Mass downloading may also obscure attempts to develop value metrics such as the JISC supported Usage Factor, and lead possibly to an arms race among publishers to deliver as many articles as possible. [...]

By: Now On the Horizon: Start-up and Apps That Can Change Your World « The Scholarly Kitchen

Fri, 29 May 2009 15:55:09 +0000

[...] could generate a usage-based impact factor (but he didn’t mention how this could be gamed, as Phil Davis showed in a post last year). Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Facebook, New ApplicVersion 72, Scholarly [...]

By: Universal Citations « The Scholarly Kitchen

Universal Citations « The Scholarly Kitchen — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:32:46 +0000

[...] in the citation process to the voting process. I’m hesitant to continue the generalization that article downloads are also similar to votes. In fair elections, you can only vote for a candidate [...]

By: Sarah Durrant

Sarah Durrant — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:02:01 +0000

When I worked at the charity INASP (www.inasp.info) part of what we did was facilitate access to electronic content from both the North and South to users in developing countries. Since this work was government funded, there was considerable emphasis on measuring impact and effectiveness. In an imperfect world, the best measure we had of the true impact of electronic resources was the increase in citations in articles produced in developing countries, not numbers of downloads. In the developing country context, counting numbers of downloads was certainly useful but more as an indicator of infrastructure capacity (e.g. connectivity and bandwidth); citation was the quality metric as it gives some indication of utility not just availability.

I raised this issue at the recent ALPSP meeting, with Richard Gedeye who was speaking on behalf of COUNTER: that whilst having commonly derived and presented quantitative metrics is useful, an industry this sophisticated should be able to establish common qualitative usage metrics as well. He agreed.

By: marlene

marlene — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:42:23 +0000

A side effect of this phenomenon is the emergence of new business models highly based on usage statistics : the more we use the resource, the more we pay.

By: Philip Davis

Philip Davis — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:14:08 +0000

Since we are weeks away from a national election in the United States, it is not difficult to think of counting article downloads like counting votes. One is looking to rank candidates based on popularity. Now imagine a system for counting article downloads where:

1) The machines are designed by a small group of powerful individuals with strong ties to industry and have stakes in their own outcome
2) Voters are allowed (even encouraged) to vote as many times as they like
3) The machines count slightly differently depending on the state they are in. Some will just count PDF, others HTML plus PDF, and others will consider a Reference view a vote as well.
4) There is no requirement to produce paper receipts, nor any form of validation at the time of enumeration (i.e. no transparency to the voting process)
5) There is no responsibility or accountability to the board governing the voting process

Would anyone rational person accept this as a valid voting procedure?

By: Wobbler

Wobbler — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:55:28 +0000

Well, to be very nitpicky, I’m not entirely correct. Citations actually lack context as well. For instance, certain fraudulent papers can be cited often in a “this paper is wrong and misled many scholars” kind of way. But in comparison to the citations that are meant to acknowledge the positive contribution of another author’s work, they are very rare.

Also, for citations of papers that have turned out to be wrong, the respective publishers/journals can (and usually do I think) have that “fixed” for their journal impact factors.

Downloads are, as you have said in this post, easy to abuse, unaccountable and lack any kind of context. What’s more, if these downloads become publicly available like in download rankings or whatever, they will cause a snowball effect of drawing more eyes to a specific paper/journal and contribute to its download count. And considering all its shortcomings to accurately represent the quality of a paper/journal (i.e. it doesn’t), using download counts is definitely not being remotely close to desirable, in my opinion.

By: Philip Davis

Philip Davis — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:16:38 +0000

Excellent point. One could say that the act of citation provides public acknowledgment of the contribution of another author. Downloading, however, is strictly a private process.

By: Wobbler

Wobbler — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:55:39 +0000

‘Citations are public, transparent, and can be validated.’

Not to mention that citations have context. I could download a paper that seems interesting (based on the abstract) but may turn out to be not very interesting after all. In that case, I can’t “take back the download count” to show that I didn’t have much use for it anyway.