I always knew Hopkins researchers and students were industrious, hardworking, and dedicated, but I never understood how busy you were until I started looking at use data from some of our electronic resources. Did you know that in 2006 every 3.75 minutes someone at Hopkins downloaded an article from Nature? That makes 16 Nature articles in an hour, 402 Nature articles in a day, 2,838 Nature articles a week, 11,352 Nature articles a month, or 147,086 Nature articles a year. Oh, BTW, that is just for regular Nature. That does not include the number of downloads for Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Reviews (Cancer, Molecular Cell Biology, or Neuroscience) or one of the other 65 Nature titles we subscribe to. All in all, in 2006 Hopkins scholars downloaded 443,975 Nature Publishing Group articles. That is a little more than 1 article every minute of every day of every week each year! You are busy, busy people. But that is really only the tip of the iceberg.
Do you wonder how well used your favorite resource is? Have any idea which Hopkins Libraries’ electronic product had over 1.1 million downloads last year? Do you stay up at night wondering which multidisciplinary product was used more LexisNexis, EBSCO, or JSTOR? Ever wonder if you are the only one downloading articles from History of Education Quarterly or Journal of Applied Ichthyology (not to be confused with theoretical ichthyology I imagine)? Do you ponder if more people download from the 1881-1883 issues of The Critic or from the 1898-1903 issues? And how many searches did Hopkins researchers do on Web of Science last year? Do you wonder how most of your fellow researchers find articles, and by that I mean, do you wonder which URL refers more researchers to our products than any other?
These and many other questions will be answered as we begin to explore the fascinating world of Library Electronic Use Statistics. I’ll keep you posted once a month on how much or how little Hopkins researchers are using these incredible tools that are available to you 24/7. Feel free to post questions on your favorite products.
My question to you is – what is everyone doing with all these journal articles???? Are you printing them out? Saving them to your computer? Reading them online then not saving them? How do you use all these articles?
A comment was emailed to me asking about the cost of electronic resources and whether open access has changed pricing models. These are great topics for discussion. I will be blogging about those issues in future posts. I’m happy to answer other questions you may have on the Libraries electronic resources. In the mean time – keep up the hard work! Liz