Revised July 28, 2003
The Usage Reports by Subject Area and Study Title represent a compilation of usage data reported by the campus libraries and storage facilities, and publishers. Print control journal data is gathered and reported by campus libraries. Print experimental journal use data is gathered and reported by the Regional Library Facilities and local storage facilities. Digital use data is reported by publishers.
Publishers participating in the Collection Management Initiative do not have a common way of reporting use data for digital journals. In some cases, the viewing or downloading of an abstract is distinguished from the viewing or downloading of the fulltext article and reported separately in publisher usage reports. In other cases, publishers make no such distinction and report one number for both abstract and fulltext article use.
CMI initially reported the use data in a way that combined abstract and fulltext article use, the belief being that this would provide a comparable figure across publishers for all digital use. However, there are concerns that this may inadvertently overstate use for some publishers. Preliminary analysis by CMI added weight to this concern.
To more closely examine how these two different reporting methods affect the analysis of journal use, CMI has restated the reported digital use for the study titles. When publishers distinguish between abstract and fulltext use, CMI only counts the fulltext use, omitting the abstract use from our statistics. When publishers make no distinction between fulltext and abstract use, we use the one figure they provide.
Publishers that report abstract and fulltext article use separately are: American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, BlackwellScience, Elsevier, Academic Press/IDEAL, JSTOR and Wiley InterScience.
Publishers that report one figure for both types of use include: Institute
of Physics, Project Muse, Royal Society of Chemistry and SIAM.
Readers are cautioned to use great care in drawing conclusions from this data. The results to date are still preliminary, and incomplete, and interpretation of these results could be misleading.
Please direct any questions about the data to Gary Lawrence at Gary.Lawrence@ucop.edu.
Send questions or comments to
Gary.Lawrence@ucop.edu
Last updated: July 23, 2003