Wednesday 16 November 2011

Plotting accesses on the axis

It's quite interesting to monitor the page accesses for publications in J. Cheminf. (which incidentally has just gotten a much improved interface). While page accesses are not citations, they do provide a measure of general interest in a paper. Also, if you reach a certain level (relative to other publications in the journal), your paper gets the "Highly Accessed" badge, which helps to highlight it. PMR has been talking about this too.

I monitored the page accesses in the first month for two recent papers, the Blue Obelisk paper and the Open Babel paper. I missed a day or two here or there, but the results are shown in this Google spreadsheet graph:
It is worth noting that about half of the accesses in the month occur in the first week. At that stage only the preliminary manuscript is available (I think it was two weeks later that the final HTML and PDF was produced). Furthermore, the DOI was not registered until the HTML went live and thus you need provide the direct URL rather than DOI if promoting the paper (I've complained about this to the journal).

3 comments:

Egon Willighagen said...

Nice! I'd love such functionality directly on the JChemInf paper...

Egon Willighagen said...

And we can also look at it with these further #altmetrics:

http://total-impact.org/report.php?id=NILcSZ

Marcus D. Hanwell said...

Thanks for sharing, these statistics would be great to see directly on the paper as Egon suggests.