Collaborators
• Johan Bollen• Edwin Henneken• Alberto Accomazzi
• http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~kurtz/PSP.pptx
Literatureall in arXiv
• 2013 Kurtz & Henneken, “Finding and Recommending Scholarly Articles” in Bibliometrics and Beyond, MIT Press
• 2010 Kurtz & Bollen, “Usage Bibliometrics” Ann Rev Information Science & Tech
• 2005 Kurtz et al. “Bibliometric Properties of Article Readership Information” J. Am Soc Information Science & Tech
Co-Usage
• Recommendations– What are people like me reading– What are people who read this also reading
• Queries– Sort by most downloaded– Sort by filtered downloads
Scholarly Articles Are Different
Scholarly Articles are MUCH denser than films
• Netflix ~ 25,000 films• ADS ~ 10,000,000 articles– 172,000 contain the word “cosmology”– >12,000 in 2012
Scholarly Articles Are Different
Scholarly Articles are read by scholars
• Typically they have subject matter doctorates• Their needs are often highly specific• There are not many of them
Aggregation
• Articles• Readers• Enhance Signal to Noise• Engineering Issues– What are you trying to achieve– Who are you doing this for– How fast must it be
What Can Be Measured
• The Interconnectedness of Science• Fields of Study• Countries• Journals• Organizations• People• Instruments• Articles
Usage map• 200M usage events• 2006 usage only• JCR journals (+-
7600)
Red, orange= psych, cognGreen = phys, chemOlive = material scienceBlue = biologyPurple = pharma
Bollen et al, 2009a
Measuring Countries
• Authors are from countries, reads as a function of author’s country has yet to be studied
• Readers are from countries, their activities allow one to measure the Scientific Wealth of Nations
Astronomy is representative
ADS predicts average of Cites+articles better than cites predicts articles
Measuring Journals
• Beyond the Impact Factor• Reads vs Cites differences will be important
here• The New York Times would have a low Impact
Factor
Standard Usage Measures
• COUNTER• David Nicholas, Ian Rowland & collaborators• University College, London• CIBER-Research
Measuring Individuals
• The number of times one’s articles are read is a valid measure of one’s scientific impact, similar to citation counts
• Use has different properties than cites, together they form a two dimensional view of productivity
Final Thoughts
• Much remains to be done– Implement “best” methods– Develop standard data
• Problems abound– Privacy– Open Access
– Who exactly is reading this paper?– Why do I care? (not money)