Edinburgh Research Explorer • www.research.ed.ac.uk • ERdata: Jan. – June 2019
The first six-months of 2019, as now seems inevitable, have proved to be the busiest six-months in Edinburgh Research Explorer’s brief history, with 543,152 downloads. This is not only the first time that the half-a-million milestone has been breached within such a short period, but represents a 35% increase on the previous best. As the chart below indicates, this rate of growth is unprecedented following a full 6-months:
This report aims to offer an overview of the last six-months of download activity on Edinburgh Research Explorer. The data generated through the IRUS-UK download statistics portal is somewhat limited, it won’t tell us much about the users, in terms of who is downloading what, but it will offer up a few broad clues. This report will investigate those clues under the following headings:
[Also available as a PDF]
a. Downloads by Country:
Unsurprisingly, the biggest proportion of downloads occur from within the UK (37%), with the US at 20% the only other major market. The other significant audiences can be summed up as the major economies of the English-speaking world, followed by our near-neighbours (with Italy being the only European country above 5k, with which we don’t share a sea border), and China.
The ‘Rest Of The World’ as a block accounted for 21% of the downloads, but that block was made up of 208 other countries and territories.
Downloads from China may be significantly under-reported in these figures, whilst the data affords us no actual evidence for this conclusion, downloads from ‘Unknown’ have shown an upward trend over the last six-months, increasing by over a thousand-per-month from January to June, and the only two countries showing a significant fall-off over the period are India (-700-per-month) and China (-1000-per-month). Additionally, the graph below would seem to indicate a certain symbiosis, with a pattern distinct from any other country in the top 30:
| Jan. | Feb. | Mar. | Apr. | May. | Jun. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| China | 4.6k | 3.2k | 4.7k | 4.5k | 3.9k | 3.5k |
| ‘Unknown’ | 3.4k | 3.0k | 4.3k | 3.9k | 3.6k | 4.4k |
| India | 2.1k | 2.0k | 1.9k | 1.7k | 1.7k | 1.5k |
b. Downloads by Item-type:
Predictably, articles make up 80% of the item-types; ‘Unknown’ = 9%, ‘Other’ = 5%, Books = 4%, and Workshop/Conference Papers just 2%.
c. Downloads by Title:
As stated in the introduction, in total there were 543,152 downloads over the first six-months of 2019, the most popular title accounted for a little over 20,000 of them (3.80%).
The nine remaining titles in the top 10, accounted for a further 32,024 downloads (5.9%); the top 10 as a whole, accounted for almost 10%. So as would be expected, the download statistics exhibit a very long tail, How long? Well, the remaining 90.3% of the downloads were distributed amongst 35,432 titles; of those, 7,957 titles (22%) were only downloaded once.
The Top 10:
- 10. ‘The ‘blemish of place’: Stigma, geography and health inequalities. A commentary on Tabuchi, Fukuhara & Iso‘ by Pearce, Jamie.
Item-type: Article
Published: December 2012
Affiliated to: School of Geosciences
Downloads: 2,275 in 2019 / 3,096 in total (73%)
Audience: UK (99%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 442 January 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2JG87if - 09. ‘Youth Crime and Justice: Key Messages from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime‘ by McAra, Lesley; McVie, Susan.
Item-type: Article
Published: May 2010
Affiliated to: School of Law
Downloads: 2,335 in 2019 / 7,513 in total (31%)
Audience: UK (92%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 559 May 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2JHoVW6 - 08. ‘Closing the attainment gap in Scottish schools: Three challenges in an unequal society‘ by McCluskey, Gillean.
Item-type: Article
Published: March 2017
Affiliated to: Moray House School of Education; Centre for Research in Education Inclusion and Diversity (CREID)
Downloads: 2,667 in 2019 / 3,998 in total (67%)
Audience: UK (98%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 548 March 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2lqr4gn - 07. ‘Payment of Another’s Debt, Unjustified Enrichment and ad hoc Agency‘ by Macgregor, Laura; Whitty, Niall R.
Item-type: Article
Published: January 2011
Affiliated to: School of Law
Downloads: 2,861 in 2019 / 2,963 in total (97%)
Audience: UK (98%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 1,090 March 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2JHoVW6 - 06. ‘Abandoned, Orphaned or Property for Ever? Copyright, Prescription and Personal Bar‘ by MacQueen, Hector.
Item-type: Article
Published: 2010
Affiliated to: School of Law
Downloads: 2,922 in 2019 / 5,936 in total (49%)
Audience: UK (99%) in 2019
1st downloaded: July 2017 • Peak: 671 April 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2LomhaL - 05. ‘Personality Structure in the Domestic Cat (Felis silvestris catus), Scottish Wildcat (Felis silvestris grampia), Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia), and African Lion (Panthera leo): A Comparative Study‘ by Gartner, Marieke Cassia; Powell, David M.; Weiss, Alexander.
Item-type: Article
Published: Aug 2014
Affiliated to: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Downloads: 3,901 in 2019 / 36,366 in total (11%)
Audience: USA (51%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 16,509 March 2018
URL: https://edin.ac/328jp71 - 04. ‘The Reform of the Law of Directors’ Duties in UK Company Law‘ by Cabrelli, David.
Item-type: Conference or Workshop Item – Other
Published: 2008
Affiliated to: School of Law
Downloads: 4,313 in 2019 / 6,147 in total (70%)
Audience: UK (59%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 1,072 March 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2woSUM3 - 03. ‘Is football bigotry confined to the west of Scotland? The Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian Rivalry‘ by Kelly, John.
Item-type: Article
Published: Jun 2013
Affiliated to: Moray House School of Education
Downloads: 4,972 in 2019 / 6,466 in total (77%)
Audience: USA (72%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 1,434 May 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2IcSwHv - 02. ‘Tubby’s dub style:The live art of record production‘ by Williams, Sean.
Item-type: Article
Published: September 2012
Affiliated to: Edinburgh College of Art
Downloads: 5,610 in 2019 / 19,982 in total (28%)
Audience: USA (71%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 1,380 June 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2wr74fE - 01. ‘FISH BONE one-person exhibition:recent works by Jonathan Gibbs at the Open Eye Gallery‘ by Gibbs, Jonathan.
Item-type: Other
Published: September 2013
Affiliated to: Edinburgh College of Art
Downloads: 20,650 in 2019 / 27,002 in total (76%)
Audience: USA (52%) in 2019
1st downloaded: May 2017 • Peak: 9,686 March 2019
URL: https://edin.ac/2wp4Ptp
Amongst the difficulties inherent in trying interpret raw data, especially with items originating in a multi-disciplinary environment like a University and being downloaded all over the world, can be the ignorance of all the possible external factors. A prime example might be the ‘FISH BONE one-person exhibition…’. Having been published nearly four-years before Edinburgh Research Explorer made its debut, it bumbled along in the first year mostly being downloaded less than 20 times a month – the odd vacation out to the mid-thirties notwithstanding. In the 2nd-year, it was barely breaking out of single figures before October …
Suddenly it was set alight, and for the next six months went supernova. And then two-months ago, it err, … fizzled out. This pattern has been driven by the American audience, with the USA accounting for at least 50% of the downloads since the start. Curiously after that, at least in 2019, the next major market has been Turkey (7%), followed by France (4%) and only then the UK at 3%.
Obviously a sample of just 10 items won’t reveal any significant patterns, but it does offer some loose threads to pull on: all ten items in the top 10 were published before Research Explorer was established, from 9 years to just 2 months before; Four of the ten came from the School of Law, but the two from ECA were massively more popular, but that popularity was overwhelmingly driven by the USA; 9/10 titles had their busiest month in this 6-month period, which shows that even though recency of publication doesn’t seem to be a factor there are currents at play; But only 6/10 had more than 50% of their total downloads in these six months, suggesting some deeper, more residual currents are also a factor. The bottom half of the top ten are all appealing almost exclusively to a home audience, suggesting popularity at home doesn’t lead to interest further afield – although the subject matter of four of the five would seem to explain that.
How to pull on those threads is another matter: a bigger sample size would be an obvious starting point; comparisons with other repositories’ data might be more illuminating; gleaning some scraps of data from publishers for the same titles, and comparing those with the numbers of citations, references, and tweets etc. might unpick a few knots.