On metrics

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Members of this list may be interested in a recent announcement 
by Berkeley Electronic Press, which can be found here:

http://www.bepress.com/download_counts.html

BEPress did a careful study of the downloads of its articles and 
discovered that usage figures were highly inflated by Internet 
robots that come to a site for any number of reasons, from 
search-engine indexing to laying the groundwork for spam attacks. 
BEPress has "come clean," but their example poses the very 
important question of how reliable some of the usage reports from 
other publishers are.  (Although I have consulted with BEPress, I 
had no involvement with this project.)

I am no expert on the metrics for journals; someone who is may 
want to take a look at this.  My hypothesis is that many 
publishers are reporting inflated figures--and that acquisition 
librarians may be making purchasing decisions in part based on 
faulty data.  Of course, downloads are far from the only metric.

One tidbit that emerged from the BEPress data is that open access 
publications were more susceptible to inflated download counts 
than toll-access articles.  Thus this analysis whittles away a 
bit at the alleged "open access advantage."

I would be interested to know whether this kind of situation has 
been previously identified and whether the current measurements 
for downloads take this matter into account.

Joe Esposito